Parks ending, well I mean, it was fine, I guess
Well that's Parks I guess. Started awful, became an excellent absurdist ensemble comedy, and ended as a weepy drama.
Just to dove-tail of your guy's posts.
Yeah it's always an interesting thing to see something end that you have/had really fond memories of.
Seasons 2 thru 5 are up there with the best comedy shows of my lifetime. Just really great stuff. And its always easy to forgot how good a show was when its not ending near its highpoint (Easy example is Cheers) but I do want to just say again that it was really great (overall as a tv show evaluating its entire run). It was sweet. It was clever. It was weird. It was smart. It was just everything. Just phenomenal. Best comedy on television certainly during that point and as good as any of the greats.
Now the other side of the coin. Season 6 and 7 are just a hot mess. They lose sight of what made the show work for me. They start over-emphasizing the cast at the expense of the town as a character and they become super fixated on making sure that these characters are perfect and have perfect lives which was not at all the original draw for me. The finale is the culmination of the wrong direction that approach brings.
I can certainly see why some people liked it. Especially if you are somebody that liked the approach of the last two seasons.
http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/02/25/parks-and-recreation-one-last-ride-reviewBut it's very hard for me to believe that this is what you wanted in a finale if you were watching during Seasons 2-5. The final two seasons have been just a very long attempt to put the nicest bow on the prettiest package you could ever want. But I don't think that makes good comedy and I don't think that makes it true to what the show was for most of its run. If ever there was a show about the journey and not the destination it was this show and the finale is all the about the destination imo. It doesn't want to leave anything unbuttoned or up to our imagination which is fine for some people but not for me. Nothing about the finale is bad per se. It covers all the bases. There are some sweet moments. It's functionally fine. I just don't like it at all. I don't like that it doesn't leave my imagination anywhere to go. The much-hated Seinfeld finale is much more true to what I felt that show was about than this one. There are lots of better episodes in the show's history that I think would have made better and more poignant stopping points. The last season in particular and the finale felt like they were going through the motions on the creative side.
But whatever. In the long view I thought it was a great show and I'll gladly re-watch it at some point in the future.