10 Defining Episodes of Park and Recreation

Closing out an improbable six-year run, NBC’s Parks and Recreation is going out on one of the great final seasons of TV comedy in recent memory. Before Leslie, Ron, and the rest of Pawnee take their final bow, though, I thought it appropriate to reflect on 10 of the episodes that made Parks and Recreation, well, Parks and Recreation. The following gallery isn’t of the “best” episodes from Parks’ tenure - doing so would take way more than 10 slots, anyway. Rather, the selections are meant to highlight individual episodes that captured the spirit of the show, which evolved greatly over the years. Episodes like “Flu Season” and “Ron and Tammy” are stone-cold comedy classics, but the impending absence of Parks and Recreation from the TV landscape means we’re losing more than just a show that knew how to make us laugh. For almost always the better, Parks and Recreation never stopped revealing new facets of its identity, and the following collection of episodes are meant to form both a timeline, and a time capsule of what the show was, what it became, and what it will be remembered for being.