Parks & Recreation perfectly skewered our tech-filled future

By Fusion Staff  |  February 20, 2015 | 7:53pm
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After seven seasons of mockumentary-style small-town satire, Parks & Recreation comes to an end Tuesday night with its series finale. The final season employed an interesting conceit: setting the show in the near future. Flipping the calendar forward to 2017, the town of Pawnee had entered into a contract with the behemoth tech company Gryzzl, which provides the citizens with Internet service, phones, tablets and plenty of punchlines. Pitting the small town bureaucracy against Gryzzl allowed the show to dive into real issues we face today, from data mining to gentrification.

While Google has rolled out high-speed Internet in Kansas City and other select cities, we’re still awaiting Facebook automatically sending Valentine’s presents engraved with our private pet names, and Amazon pre-delivering a package at that time of month so we can “score some ‘pons.” Let’s take a look back at what Parks and Recreation thinks our future holds…

1. Touch screens are so late aughts. You will flip through your Tinder options with the greatest of ease with frictionless air gestures.

2. Remember Tamagatchi? Neither do we, but we heard some olds talking about them and they sounded cute. Your new best friend will be the AI program on your holo-tablet. Watch out though; he gets grumpy when you don’t feed him compliments.

3. The FAA has its act together in Park & Rec’s version of 2017, and delivery by drone is a government-approved reality. It can’t ring your doorbell but it can ring your smartphone.

4. In our not-so-distant future, we will compose symphonies in mid-air, and we will finally get that VR upgrade to the Nintendo power glove. But some things won’t change: The brogrammer dress code is still strictly enforced at Gryzzl’s headquarters and there are no ovaries in sight.

5. Late for your 4:20 p.m. meeting in 2017? No problem, just skate there on your Gryzzle pad.

6. “This is a flying robot I just shot out of the sky” -Ron Swanson, Drone Hunter. (Incidentally that is a spin off I would watch.)

It’s hard to imagine a future without Parks & Recreation in our television line-up; you will be missed!

Cara Rose DeFabio is a pop addicted, emoji fluent, transmedia artist, focusing on live events as an experience designer for Real Future.

 
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