10 Secret Subplots You Learn From Watching Parks & Recreation Deleted Scenes

After a shaky first season, Parks and Recreation enjoyed a major uptick in quality and started to go from strength to strength.

By the end of its run, it had cemented itself as one of the most hilarious and heartfelt sitcoms in TV history, brought to life by both its delightful cast and hysterical writing.

But like most network sitcoms, Parks and Rec was sadly beholden to the strictures of 21-minute episodes, ensuring plenty of quality material was left on the cutting room floor.

But NBC has at least had the decency to release many of these deleted scenes on home video or online, allowing fans to devour those gags and even those subplots which couldn't quite make it in.

And so, we come to the 10 deleted scenes which, no matter how small or elaborate they were, said something important about the characters within them while usually being hilarious to boot.

In each case, they absolutely should've been included in the final cut of the episode itself, and though some of them don't technically count as canon, once you've seen them, you'll immediately view the characters involved in another light...

Though Parks and Rec's pilot episode is considered weak sauce by most fans - as is most of the first season, in fact - the pilot did hide one vital piece of character work in one of its deleted scenes.

In the scene, April Ludgate (Aubrey Plaza) reveals that she ended up working for Pawnee's Parks Department because she missed the sign-up day for internships.

The reason for this? Her sister forgot to wake her up on time, and so April was randomly assigned to Parks and Rec. And so, the course of April's entirely life was irreparably altered because of her sister's mistake.

But considering we wouldn't have April and Andy (Chris Pratt) without the gaffe, it was most certainly for the best. Given how revelatory this scene is, it's criminal that it didn't make the episode's final cut.