Parks & Recreation was a mostly cheerful series, but it had its dose of darkness disguised as comedy every time the Parks group was mean to Jerry. Created by Greg Daniels and Michael Schur, Parks & Recreation debuted on NBC in 2009 and came to an end in 2015 after seven seasons. The series followed the always optimistic Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) and her friends and coworkers from the Parks Department in the fictional town of Pawnee, Indiana.
Over the course of seven seasons, viewers got to know the characters in Parks & Recreation quite well, such as Ron Swanson, Tom Haverford, and April Ludgate. There were others that were initially credited as recurring characters and eventually made it to the main cast, as they took part in most episodes and situations in the series, such as Jerry Gergich (whose real name is actually Garry).
Jerry, played by Jim O’Heir, was very clumsy and was often involved in all types of embarrassing situations, which is why his coworkers constantly mocked him and never saw that he was actually a man of many talents. But more than just making fun of him, what the characters did to Jerry was bullying.
Jerry started as a regular character since the pilot episode, and his personality wasn’t fully formed until the second season. It was after season 2’s episode “Practice Date”, where the Parks crew comes up with a contest to see who can find the most dirt on each other, that the creators knew where they were going with Jerry. In the episode, Mark Brendanawicz reveals that Jerry was adopted – something Jerry didn’t know. Schur said that after that they realized who Jerry is: “the guy who wants to put his head down and get his pension, but is asking for it all the time”, and from then on, it was like “throwing chum into the water. Every script after that had 15 slams on Jerry”. However, the writers also made sure to establish that, as much as they bullied him, the other characters really liked him and cared for him. Still, how Jerry was treated throughout the series wasn’t always funny.
What the characters did to Jerry was bullying, and while most times they were inoffensive jokes, there were moments where they crossed the line and humiliated him, and it wasn’t funny at all. O’Heir’s performance has been praised, but the constant mockery of Jerry has received negative criticism and with good reason. The writers even tried to make up for it by giving Jerry the perfect family, but that doesn’t erase all the uncomfortable moments brought by how badly he was treated – more so because he never did wrong to anyone. Although Jerry brought many laughs to fans of Parks & Recreation, the way he was treated went too far more often than not, and poor Jerry couldn’t even catch a break when dead, with his name being misspelled on his gravestone.
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