Parks & Recreation made it very clear that Pawnee and Eagleton were rival towns, and Leslie didn’t miss an opportunity to share how much she hated Eagleton and its residents, but why couldn’t she stand them? Created by Greg Daniels and Michael Schur, Parks & Recreation made its debut on NBC in 2004, and even though its first season wasn’t the best, the writers found the right tone and style for it towards the end, and the series got to live for six more seasons, coming to an end in 2015.
Parks & Recreation followed the daily lives of the always optimistic Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) and her friends from the Parks Department in the fictional town of Pawnee, Indiana – which, according to Leslie, is the greatest town in America. Although Leslie kept a good attitude towards all adversities most of the time, there was one topic that immediately sent her into the opposite attitude: Eagleton. Pawnee’s neighbor wasn’t Leslie’s favorite, and she often spoke about how much she disliked the town and those living in it, calling them various names. Funny enough, Leslie was born in Eagleton, but she considered herself a full Pawneean.
Leslie’s hate for Eagleton goes all the way back to the founding of both towns. According to history within the series, shortly after Pawnee was founded in 1817, its wealthiest and most prominent citizens left to the west after finding Pawnee’s soil untenable and its smell quite unpleasant. They then founded their own town, Eagleton, which had a lot of things that Pawnee lacked. For example, as Eagleton is located on top of a hot spring, the town has plants that other cities in Indiana simply can’t plant, such as palm trees. Leslie even accused the town of stealing Pawnee’s money, and the attitude of Eagletonians only added to her hatred.
Leslie described Eagleton as “the land of rich, snobby jerks” which isn’t entirely wrong. The Eagletonians that Leslie had to deal with throughout the series weren’t nice people at all (except the architect who designed Pawnee Commons), always bragging about everything Eagleton has and diminishing everything Pawnee ever did and achieved. Eagleton’s residents were all about luxury, to the point where Forbes Magazine called it a “model city the rest of America would do well to emulate”. The town spent a lot of money on a lot of things that made them look elegant, and the air of the town always smelled like vanilla thanks to their cupcake factory. Eagletonians had a superiority complex, which Leslie couldn’t stand, and even made unnecessarily rude comments related to Pawnee, including how they called their boogers “Pawnee Caviar”.
Leslie had to leave all her Eagleton hate aside when the town accumulated too much debt and the only way to save it (and Pawnee too, in the process) was by reabsorbing it, thus merging both towns. Of course, neither Eagleton’s nor Pawnee’s residents were fully on board with the idea, but after some time the merger proved to be quite successful. The Parks Department also welcomed a part of Eagleton when the main characters’ counterparts joined, though not all of them lasted for long. Although it’s understandable that Leslie never liked the attitude of Eagleton’s residents, she was too rude sometimes, but luckily, she was mature enough to leave all that aside and help the town when it needed it.
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July 05, 2020 at 06:39AM
