Mike Schur

We've learned so much about so much stuff, it's been like a rotating course of lectures that we've had in our writers room, and it's been so fun.

I don't think that I totally understood the level of which moral decision making can become a factor in your life, where from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep almost everything you do has a moral component, it can drive you nuts. I'm not necessarily saying this is a good thing.

I am extremely wary about ascribing success or failure to the show in any goal, people used to ask if I felt like' Parks and Recreation' had convinced people that government could be good or something.

I remember this one time there was a woman on a train who recognized me from the show, and we started crying, i feel like there's a real desire for people to see other people being good to each other, especially where we're at right now in the country where it just doesn't feel like that's happening very much.

It's made things a little more exciting this year, we were able to accelerate through three additional unseen years of all of their lives and really get them to a place where they've been through a lot.

There's a gigantic battle that is waged for. It's sort of Leslie Knope's final big project, she's fighting a corporation for control over something. The arc of the season is about what I think is probably the most important issue facing America, which is not just public sector vs. private sector, but specifically it becomes about the issue of privacy.

Part of the story of the premiere is that this team doesn't work together anymore, and she feels like she needs them back to do this final big project, the closeness of this group of people is fraying at the edges just because people's lives are taking them in different directions, and that culminates in the series finale.

Because we had written so many season finales that could be series finales and because we were always unsure of our future, we accelerated the characters so dramatically in terms of their personal lives and their professional lives, we got to a point where it's like, what are we going to do? Follow Leslie to Washington? Are we just going to keep going until she's the president?

We were preparing for them to say anything from, 'No, you guys are done after this year,' all the way to, 'No, we want a full season and possibly an eighth season,' they said, 'That sounds great. Let's do that.' And that was the end of the conversation.

That's a rare thing in Hollywood where you make a request from the people who pay you and they say, 'Sounds good,' we really were able to put all the pieces on the chess board and arrange them exactly the way we wanted, so it was like a control freak's dream.

It feels like just a result of this new era of TV that we're all in. People don't want to wait. People don't want to let seasons unfold slowly over the course of eight months, it wasn't at all what we expected but also, the more we thought about it, the more it was like I see the value in that. Amy is co-hosting the Golden Globes again, and the show will launch two days after she hosts the Globes and, as luck would have it, this season happens to be extremely serialized, especially at the beginning, so airing back-to-back is actually kind of cool.

We were weirdly kicked out of our offices and now we're all crammed into this tiny corner of the building where we've been for the past six years while we edit the last few episodes.