The L'il Sebastian of it all

A sendoff for a real one

Some housekeeping first — it’s the last episode of season 3! And conveniently enough, I’m about to jet off for 3 weeks of vacation to the Philippines and Japan. I’ll be taking a break from everything computer-related while I’m away, which includes Park It. I’ll be back the week of June 9th and will dive right into Parks season 4 that week. Season 4 is a GREAT one. Leslie runs for office!!!

But I certainly can’t be leaving you all high and dry, so I’ve prepped a few posts to roll in while I’m out. ENJOY, and catch you when I’m back on this side of the Pacific!

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“Bye, byeeeee L’il Sebastian!” was the cry-heard-round-the-world. The modern day version of Paul Revere. It’s damn near Parks and Rec’s theme song, their catchphrase. It’s probably, no holds barred, the show’s most iconic episode ever.

The season 3 finale sees the Parks department mourning the lost of their favorite mini horse, L’Il Sebastian, who has passed away from old age some time between the Harvest Festival, nine episodes before, and now. They decide to throw an extravagant memorial service for him in the park behind Ann’s house, complete with bonfire, Jerry reading a 15th century Italian elegy, a dramatic and pensive movie trailer from Tom, and — of course — Andy’s iconic send-off song, “5,000 Candles in the Wind.”

I’ve said this before, many a time, but this is a bar-for-bar perfect Parks episode. There’s not one single bad minute or wasted line. Someone went over and over and over this script with a red pen before it aired. There’s something really incredible about watching an episode where you can just tell every single person involved in the making of this was at the very top of their game. It’s magic on screen.

It’s funny how large L’il Sebastian looms in the collective Parks consciousness because in reality, he’s only featured — alive — in one episode of Parks. One!! We get him once before he dies, and that’s in the Harvest Festival episode. There’s this weird moment in season 7 where they bring him back as a hologram, but that’s it. We meet him, the whole Parks family’s obsessed with him, and he kicks the bucket nine episodes later.

And yet — he’s one of the iconic bits the show is best known for. There are mugs with the L’il Sebastian logo (I have one), he’s on stickers (also me), and "bye bye L’il Sebastian” is a theme song that even the most casual Parks watcher knows.

I love thinking about characters, habits, or traditions that loom incredibly large in a show’s lore, but in reality only make brief appearances. They seem to take on a life of their own in the fandoms, and as the networks or shows realize how much their fandom has seized onto + loves that one thing, they often pump merch and memes and revamps back into that whole engine. A few other examples that come to mind, a la L’Il Sebastian:

1. The Soup Nazi in Seinfeld — I’m about to say something spicy, which is that I’ve never actually seen Seinfeld, so I honestly have no idea what (or who?) the Soup Nazi is. But when

   Jennifer Keishin Armstrong
   and I started going down this whole “L’il Sebastian’s only in one episode” rabbit hole during our last conversation, she immediately likened it to the Seinfeld Soup Nazi, who’s apparently also only in one episode of the show. Seems relevant! Maybe I should watch Seinfeld.

2. The cockamouse in How I Met Your Mother — a half-rodent, half-bug that haunts the cast’s various apartments, the cockamouse only really makes an appearance in one, maybe two episodes. But it’s now a pretty heavily adopted phrase in the HIMYM fandom, which people really just say to mean they saw a seriously scary bug. Or maybe a mouse.

3. True American — New Girl’s pride and joy and its greatest invention. The loft only plays True American five times over the course of the show, which is an insanely small number given how much of a life its taken on in pop culture. Friends of mine in college played True American most weekends. People quite literally study the episodes, scenes by scene, to extrapolate the rules.

4. “Bears. Beets. Battlestar Galatica.” – a prank pulled by Jim on Dwight in one literally specific episode of The Office, but an inescapable joke if you look up “office merch” on Google or Etsy.

Parks and Rec has other traditions and recurring bits that loom large — Galentine’s Day is a great example, or Leslie’s crush on then-Vice President Joe Biden, or April and Andy’s alter egos, Burt Macklin and Janet Snakehole. They make fans feel as if they’re in on some inside joke with the rest of the cast, in on some secret of the show. A language only we speak.

But I’ve also been thinking about the fine line that exists between a bit being funny and being overdone. Is it annoying to see “Bears. Beets. Battlestar Galatica” on a sign outside of basically every bar in the world that has propped open their doors on a sunny day and makes a beer pun (“Beers. Beets…”? Sure, it makes me roll my eyes. And do I think it’s just a liiiiiittle bit insane that even non-Parks fans over the world know who L’il Sebastian is, when he’s only alive in one episode? Definitely I do!

There’s a bit of a dark side to these bits and characters looming large in pop culture — as much as it’s cool to see them take on a life of their own, and as much as knowing the rules of True American (“the floor is lava”) makes you feel like you’re really in there in the loft with Nick and Jess and Winston, I think that the way fandoms, licensees, and merch retailers have really blow the memes out of the water leaves them running the risk of feeling very over-memed. They can become too much of the show’s personality, quickly. Which leads us to actually miss some of the under-appreciated moments of the show — L’il Sebastian is fantastic, but we forget about that perfect moment at the end of this episode, when Leslie gets identified by two campaign managers to run for office. It’s overshadowed by the L’il Sebastian of it all.

We see a similar muscle play out on SNL too. SNL’s had two objectively huge sketches this season — “Domingo” and “Parking Lot Altercation.” They’re fantastic. I rolled around laughing watching them both for the first time. Clips from the sketches took on lives of their own on TikTok. There were Domingo Halloween costumes. Parking Lot Altercation was shown at Thanksgivings round the country.

The public response to these sketches was so swift and so positive that SNL almost immediately riffed on variations within the same season. They brought back the sequel to “Domingo” with Sabrina Carpenter, and later with Charli XCX. And “Parking Lot Altercation” — a completely great sketch, but one that relies entirely on the jump scare of Melissa McCarthy popping up in Chloe Fineman’s window at the end — came back for round two last weekend, during Quinta Brunson’s show.

Again, I love these sketches! But there was absolutely no need to revive them multiple times over the course of one season, just to play into the fandom fever pitch. There’s a real benefit into letting something breathe and escaping that oversaturation trap. It’s great to see them on screen again, but it kind of cheapens the value of that perfect original sketch and overshadows the other good sketches in that episode.

I can’t imagine that the Parks writers really would have foreseen any L’il Sebastian memes running rampant in their time writing season 3. I think it’s actually a stroke of genius that they killed him off when they did, before he could become an exhausted bit in the show. We already drag him back in hologram-form later on. Imagine a version of the show when L’il Sebastian’s paraded out every season, always with the same reaction from Ron and Ben and Leslie. It would get tired, very quickly, even for our favorite little horse dude.

But his impact in popular culture is undeniable, despite appearing in so few episodes. You can’t look up anything about Parks without seeing L’il Sebastian mentioned. He’s in meme accounts and TikTok clips and on merch.

True Parks fans are so happy to spread the L’il Sebastian love. These episodes are, at the end of the day, fantastic — we want as many people as possible to see what they’re all about. We just don’t want the mini horse we love so much to become so overdone he becomes cringe. We want him to stay respectably l’il.