It’s Galentine’s Day! What’s Galentine’s Day? “It’s only the best day of the year,” according to Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) in a season 2 episode of Parks and Recreation. (The second-best day behind Treat Yourself day, if you ask Aziz Ansari’s Tom and Retta’s Donna.) Every February 13th, Leslie explains, “My lady friends and I leave our husbands and our boyfriends at home, and we just come and kick it, breakfast-style. Ladies celebrating ladies. It’s like Lilith fair, minus the angst. Plus frittatas.” It’s a tradition that continues today: the lady friends of Parks and Rec reunited (again!) for a special selfie posted to Rashida Jones’ Instagram on Galentine’s Day 2023.
“Happy Galentine’s Day,” Jones (Ann Perkins) captioned the post reuniting Poehler, Aubrey Plaza (April Ludgate), and Kathryn Hahn (Jennifer Barkley). (Hahn and Plaza previously reunited for the currently-filming Marvel Studios series Agatha: Coven of Chaos, a spinoff of Disney+’s WandaVision.)
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Parks and Rec ran for seven seasons on NBC, concluding with its series finale in 2015. In 2020, Poehler, Jones, Plaza, and former co-stars Adam Scott (Ben Wyatt), Nick Offerman (Ron Swanson), Aziz Ansari (Tom Haverford), Retta (Donna Meagle), and Jim O’Heir (Garry Gergich) reunited for A Parks and Recreation Special, a quarantine-set special episode fundraising for Feeding America’s COVID-19 Response Fund. Parks and Rec guest stars who reprised their roles in the broadcast special included Paul Rudd, Megan Mullally, Ben Schwartz, Mo Collins, Jon Glaser, Jay Jackson, and Jason Mantzoukas.
But the special, which scored nearly 4 million viewers and raised more than $3 million for Feeding America, was not a trial run for a Parks and Rec revival. Like Li’l Sebastian, the show is now 5,000 candles in the wind.
“I would never say never [to a Parks and Rec reboot] because why bother saying never, but this felt like a moment in time and a cause that we could all rally behind and that made sense,” series co-creator and episode co-writer Mike Schur said during a 2020 press conference. “Parks and Rec had a very specific subject to discuss and very specific point to make…We held on by the skin of our teeth at times, but we were lucky enough to be around for seven years and 120-something episodes, I think.”
Schur continued: “And when it ended, Amy and I used to talk a lot about this: We felt like we made our point. We had an argument; we made the argument and we got out. I don’t see the point of rebooting a show or revamping a show or getting a show back up and running just to do it … Again, I’ll never say never — it’s an unbelievably great group of people from top to bottom, from Amy Poehler all the way to the PAs that we hired to be on the set with us.”
Schur went on to add that there was “a real joy in the creation and the execution of the show,” but that isn’t “enough of [a] reason to make something these days. I think it has to have a reason to live and we had our reason, we made our point. I don’t anticipate any long-term reboot or anything like that.”
Parks and Recreation is streaming on Peacock.
