What if we got married tomorrow?
You're invited to April and Andy's Fancy Party
Hey everyone! Sorry I missed ya last week — I decided last minute to take the week off from writing. It was my birthday, so I kicked up my feet and had a grand ole time. (Read: I was recovering from a big weekend in Tahoe with my wonderful and loving friends who have forever lost my trust because they Iced me 6 times, including one in my cake. I was mainly recovering from a hangover that stretched from Sunday into Wednesday evening and I just simply did not have the brain cells for Park It). Here’s some bts footage:
On Park It’s horizon, it’s ALMOST my one-year anniversary of launching this fun little Substack. I have some tricks up my sleeve for the near future!! We’re in a golden era of Parks and Rec. I’m trying to figure out how best to celebrate my favorite episode ever, “The Fight,” which is fast approaching. If anyone has suggestions, lmk. I’m currently leaning towards recreating a bar fight with my friends and getting them all drunk off of Snakejuice.
Most importantly, though, is that I ordered some really cute stickers of my new logo to celebrate Park It’s one year anniversary! If you want me to mail you one, fill this out and I’ll get ‘em shipped. And then you have to send me pics of them on your water bottles, laptops, cars, on street lamps, whatever!
Now that all of that’s out of the way, onto this week’s episode: “April and Andy’s Fancy Party.” Otherwise known as … April and Andy’s wedding.
After only dating for a month, April and Andy decide to get married. The exchange goes something like this:
Andy: “We were hanging out the other day, and I said ‘what if we got married tomorrow?’ And April said…
April: “‘Fine.’”
They trick the Parks department by telling them that it’s a “fancy party” and then get married in an incredibly impromptu, low fuss ceremony, hosted in Andy’s bandmate’s Burley’s house (which later becomes April & Andy’s house). Andy wears a Reggie Wayne Colts jersey, who I’m told is a football player. April wears a white sundress that I actually also think I once owned from American Eagle. Everyone besides Leslie is supportive of the idea and stoked for them, and Leslie herself comes around by the end of the episode. Andy asks Tom, Ron, Chris, and Ben to be his Best Man, which leads Tom to compete to become the “best” Best Man.
It’s actually a pretty damn touching episode. April and Andy’s vows bring a slight tear to my eye. There’s a very tender moment where April gives Leslie a hug and tells her she’s awesome and she loves her. A classic example of many, many Mike Schur Moments — MSM, for those who remember — the sweetness only cut by a perfectly tight script that packs in as many jokes as possible in 22-minutes.
I’ve talked about this in my conversations with before, but just to reiterate: April and Andy’s wedding feels so insanely rushed. The two of them have been classic will-they-wont-they-ing for almost a full season now. They’ve JUST gotten together about 3 episodes before this. They had a spat at the Harvest Festival two episodes back that was so childish it was hard to watch. And here they are getting married?? It’s nuts.
It’s nuts and yet — with one single episode, their marriage becomes one of the core stabilizing fixtures of the show. They never waver in their loyalty to each other for a second. They actually become only more obsessed with each other the older they get.
Watching this episode, it’s helpful to remember that the show was almost canceled many, many times. The writers and the cast fought for their lives after every single season to get renewed, especially in the early days. The writers basically just threw every bit of magical little ideas out into the ether and decided to deal with the aftermath of it all if they stayed on air. No plotline was too crazy.
I was just rereading Jim O’Heir’s — aka Jerry Gergich’s — book, Welcome to Pawnee, that he released last year about his days on P&R. Mike Schur includes a few quotes in the book and in one of them he writes:
“Every year, we got to the end of the season, and we didn’t know whether we were coming back….All we could do is put our heads down, do our jobs, and make the episodes as good as they possibly can be, air them, and hope for the best. That is exactly what we did. We made the best episodes we could. What that means is that we were not holding anything back. Any idea that we ever had for the distant future — for season 5, say — all of that went out the window. We were doing it right now because we needed to leave it all on the court. We had no reason to delay. Andy and April had kind of gotten together at the end of season 2, and we were like ‘Screw it, they’re getting married. Because that’s more exciting and more fun.’”
The frenetic pace of the plot but simultaneous obsession with making the scripts as tight as possible is what means season 3 so damn good — it’s an on-screen interpretation of what it looks like to give a show your all.
Actually, according to Jim, the show actually was canceled once. A private plane of NBC execs were on a flight from NYC to California. As the plane was leaving New York, they made the decision to cancel Parks. But by the time it touched down, the show had been greenlit again. I kind of shudder just to think of the suit vibes in that cabin.
I love the story behind Parks and Rec hanging on by the skin of its teeth. It’s equally terrifying to imagine a world without Leslie Knope as it is gratifying to watch magic happening on screen every single week. It’s a story that’s unique to the dying age of network television and not something we get in the same way in the streaming era.
There are, of course, various nuances to the streaming era, now that we’re 10+ years past the OG Orange is the New Black and Stranger Things crazes. Many shows now — Game of Thrones, Severance, White Lotus, Sex Lives of College Girls — are released week after week as if they were network television dramas or comedies, building audience hype into a fervor online as each episode drops. But many of these shows are filmed months, if not years, in advance. House of the Dragon and Severance very infamously leave their rapt audiences hanging on cliffhangers for years while they film the next 8-10 episodes, which we consume like rabid little dogs when they’re released and then circle angrily until the next season drops, long after we’re old and gray.
And in streaming, there are — of course — shows that are canceled all of the time, just like on network television. I’m still to this day pissed about A League of Their Own, which I binged entirely in one Sunday back in 2022 and then went through the full spectrum of human emotions when it was renewed THEN canceled months later.
For many of Parks seasons, the cast concurrently were filming episodes as a season started airing. Meaning that as the season 2 premiere rolled, the cast were filming something like episode 16 of that same season. They could adjust for audience feedback in real time, cut out characters who just weren’t it (cough Brendenawicz), beef up storylines that were really landing with audiences, and essentially play every card they had available just to avoid the chopping block.
This is something we’ve lost with streaming, no matter how much I LOVE the fact that Mindy Kaling can drop a fully formed Kate Hudson show onto my Netflix on any given Sunday. The streaming model keeps a show at arms distance. I don’t feel as deeply invested in the development of the show and I’m not critical to its success or failure in real time. We’re not waiting on bated breath the same way we were for network television, where we’ve invested WEEKS of Thursday after Thursday into Leslie and Ben, the very real threat of cancelation constantly determining whether we’ll get to see their journey through to the end.
I often think about this quote from “Miss Americana,” the Taylor Swift Documentary that I’ve seen at least ~fifteen times~. There’s a moment where Taylor says something like “I’ve been in the spotlight for so long that I think my fans have this feeling that they grew up alongside me.” I feel that way too about a scrappy little network sitcom like Parks and Rec — as it was growing and changing, its fans were growing alongside it. It’s a reflection back to fans of their lives over the course of seven years, and it could have been lost at every single second.
This is part of the reason I love April and Andy’s love story so much. It’s a love story that almost didn’t happen on a show that almost didn’t happen, that ultimately acts as the linchpin for the rest of the show’s foundation from here on out. We’re seeing a rock solid foundational pillar form in real time, rooting into the ground and sticking there until the end.
It makes me more okay with the chaotic feelings I get from the fact that they literally get married in this episode after dating for one month … even though selfishly I may have loved a little more will-they-wont-they time.
One of my favorite moments of the episode that caused me to fully laugh out loud was when Tom and Jean-Ralphio are workshopping Tom’s best man speech.
Jean-Ralphio: “Okay this is what I would do: I would start with a joke. Joke, Vince Vaughn quote, obviously.”
Tom: “Swingers, Crashers…?”
Jean-Ralphio: “Fred Claus :)”
Love this episode! April and Andy's weirdly mature relationship is one of the great surprises of this series. Plus it turned out they had SO MANY other couples to make.