Stay up to date with notifications from The Independent

Notifications can be managed in browser preferences.

Parks and Recreation: Season 7 to take place in the future after season 6 finale's time jump

Finale jumped forward a month, then three years

Christopher Hooton
Saturday 26 April 2014 17:30 BST
Comments

Parks and Recreation pulled out all the stops with its season 6 finale last night, with twists abound and cameos from Michelle Obama and Jon Hamm.

*Spoilers*

The biggest surprise was its time jump though, wrapping things up surprisingly neatly (given there's definitely going to be another season) three years in the future where Leslie is pregnant with triplets and has landed her dream job running the National Parks Service Midwest bureau from Pawnee.

It suggests the seventh series will be something of a departure from the previous ones, with executive producer Michael Schur discussing its format with Entertainment Weekly this week.

While work has yet to start on it properly, he said the show won't be doing a "J.J. Abrams" and start flashing backwards and forwards through time, but predominantly take place in the new, three-years-ahead time period.

"When we resume, we will be three years into the future?" EW asked.

He replied: "Here’s what I’ll say: First of all, we won’t start really planning the season for another month, so I don’t want to say anything definitively. But what we decided when we did this was: This is not a yank. We are not teasing something that we are not going to then pay off. The majority of the season is going to take place in that time period, and that is allowing for certainly the possibility of episodes that fill in certain gaps that go back in time a little bit. That, who knows, go forward in time. Now we’ve established this as a possibility. But we’re not going to see Leslie pregnant for the whole year, we’re not going to see her give birth. The whole season is not going to be about filling in those gaps — the main action of the season will take place in that slightly futurescape. We may go back and see a couple of things here and there of what happened in the interim, but we’re not faking you out. This is a real shift for the show in terms of when it takes place."

Schur added that he intends to go beyond the setting in the season 6 finale, so we may well get to see Leslie struggling with triplets.

"Subject to change based on the discussion of the writers, I intend to go past that moment," he said. "I intend that to be one of the earlier things that you’d see."

Parks and Rec has been assured it will get a season 7, but there's no air date as yet.

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Comments

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in