Here Are Your Favorite 'Parks and Recreation' Characters

By Lord Castleton | Miscellaneous | June 1, 2015 |

By Lord Castleton | Miscellaneous | June 1, 2015 |

Well, the exit polls are finally starting to roll in for the Pajiba Favorite Five competition and by that I mean that I spent much of the weekend with an abacus and a box of Chips Ahoy as my eleven year old barked out names from the results thread.

HIM: One vote for Veronica Mars!

ME: Veronica Mars! Got it.

HIM: One vote for Han Solo!

ME: Got it!

HIM: One vote for…wait what does Holy Jeebus mean? Is that a swear?

ME: No, you can just skip that.

HIM: You want me to read off the swear words too? Like the next person was like “Holy F-word this was hard.”

ME: Really? I thought I checked that…

HIM: I’m just kidding.

ME: Grumble grumble

HIM: One vote for Wooderson. Wooderson? Who’s that?

ME: Don’t worry about it. (and on and on and on)

The tallying process ended up taking on a life of its own and as the final spreadsheet takes shape some interesting proclivities of the Pajiba world street gear team are coming to light. Take this, for example…

This is how all the Parks & Rec votes played out:

I think we’d all guess that Leslie would be the overall winner, but Ron Swanson in third? That is not at all what I expected. He had the exact same number of votes as Donna Meagle. TREAT YO SELF, Donna! Though the writers barely gave Donna any meaty scenes she still managed to inject herself into the public consciousness. Ron Swanson is an internet sensation, and has T-shirts and websites and meat parties. But in the eyes of Pajiba, all of his inspired Libertarian bluster is roughly equal to fabulous Donna and her Mercedes.

Another shocker of the data: Jerry Gergich beats Tom Haverford. Daaaaaaamn son! Remember when Tom was worried about becoming the new Jerry? Well, according to Pajiba, he has.

April Ludgate in second place kind of kicks ass, though. I think she’d roll her eyes about that.

Now, all of this has to be taken with a little grain of salt because the question was about your favorite five characters in general and these just happened to be the Parks and Recreation choices.

That being said, maybe that makes it a more pure sampling because if I asked “Who are your favorite five Parks & Rec characters” you’d be weighing them by judging their value inside of this world rather than their value as members of the entire world of characters. Or would you? Who would you end up picking?

Ann, for example, got zero votes. If you were re-shuffling your answer to just include the show’s cast, would Ann crack your top five? How about Paul Schneider’s Mark Brendanawicz? Or Louis C.K.’s cop Dave Sanderson?

And is there anyone out there that likes Councilman Jamm? That dude irritated me.

More results forthcoming- all the total results and also broken down by medium, show, gender, etc. I’m going over the data for a third time because I’m really surprised at the way everything shook out. I think you will be too…