Parks and Recreation wrapped production in December on its seventh and final season, but much of the cast, along with co-creator/showrunner Mike Schur, assembled today at the TCA (Television Critics Association) press tour to discuss the end of the series, which just began airing this week. That group included Chris Pratt, who has become quite the movie star over the course of a few months, on the heels of Guardians of the Galaxy and with Jurassic World coming up (and of course, he also has his voice role in The LEGO Movie).

Aziz Ansari, Chris Pratt and Amy Poehler discuss Parks and Recreation at the TCA Press Tour in Pasadena, CA.

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Chris Pratt, Amy Poehler, Mike Schur and Adam Scott.

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Pratt was asked why, even as more opportunities arose, he stayed with Parks and Recreation and replied, “Oh, man, it’s funny that you would ask that because it never once occurred to me… I’ve never even asked myself the question. That was never… That would never happen. I would never f**king ever leave this show!”Interjected Aziz Ansari, ”We’re all leaving now.” Said Pratt, “What? What do you mean?!” When Ansari told him, “We’re out,” Pratt shook his head, sighing, “I need to pay attention more.”More seriously, Pratt remarked, “You know, I’ve been in this business for 15 years, and I’m realizing the things that really matter about what you’re doing, for me at least, are just the relationships you have while you’re doing it. And for me, this show… I mean, I hope that I could possibly have the good fortune of finding another group of people like this, but I don’t expect I ever will. I don’t care how much money someone would offer me or what I could be offered, I wouldn’t abandon ship. There’s no f**king way. This team was awesome, and the process of making this show spoke to me and was so perfect for me like the way I like to work. Like it’s loose, and it’s fun, and you get to try something new every take, and you get to you have the opportunity of making Amy Poehler laugh or making Adam Scott laugh…”Pratt’s candid statements didn’t end there though. He had a lot to say about what he felt about a much-debated part of online life – the comments. The topic came up when the Parks crew were asked if they had advice for anyone who would be following in their footsteps with a new NBC comedy.Said Pratt, “Advice you could give to those new shows is don’t read comments because it doesn’t mean anything. Faster is funnier and don’t be afraid to be sentimental. But don’t read the f**king comments and what everyone thinks. It doesn’t f**king matter. It really doesn’t, and if you change your vision to try to fit what some jackass online thinks or some group of f**king nitwits think as they’re f**king jerking off writing comments, you’re going to f**king lose your vision. So screw everybody who writes comments. Don’t read them. It’s just a crazy, toilet bowl that you stick your head in and you flush downfor as long as you want to waste time. But if you have time to read comments, you should be rewriting your jokes. Don’t read comments.”Given Pratt was speaking in front of a room of people who critique TV shows for a living, it was very funny when Amy Poehler then added, “But thank you for your support!”Pratt clarified to the room, “No, your opinion matters, but not some dickhead in f**king Ohio who’s probably 12 or some s**t.”On Parks and Rec, Andy Dwyer went through a lot of changes, careers and lifestyles. I asked Pratt his favorite incarnation of Andy, and he quickly replied, “I loved living in the Pit. That was awesome. Living in the Pit was amazing and having dirt fights and rock fights with bums. It’s like being dirty, that was just the best for me. Doing stunts into it.”Revealed Schur, “We had a joke that I think we cut that you had become, like, kind of good friends with some gophers. At one point, there was a long run where he was talking about these gophers down there, and he kept talking about them, and then he started referring to them by name, and it was like, I am sure we cut all of this. But it was like they were his buddies.” Clarified Pratt, “My associates. Friends is weird. My associates!”When I asked Pratt about Andy’s overall evolution, he declared, “It’s been awesome. It was like, you know, he was kind of just a guy who was going to essentially bring our audience into the Parks and Rec department through Ann needing this park in her backyard or needing this pit filled in, and he was the kind of douchey guy that incites this. He’s the reason it was going to start, and then he was going to disappear, and they were going to focus on the Parks department, but we were just kind of having so much fun. So they’re always trying to find some way to bring Andy in. Like sometimes I come to work, and I’ll be like, ‘Why is Andy here today? What does he do here again?’’ And they’re like, ‘Ah, he just shines shoes” or “He’s somebody’s assistant.’”Said Schur, “He became a shoeshine guy because we started early on in Season 2 [an idea] about how if we stayed with him for a long time he was going to be this real Horatio Alger kind of guy - a guy pulling himself up, like a Charles Dickens character or something, going from living in a pit to… At one time early on in Season 2, we were like, ‘The end of the show is Andy is the mayor!’ That was what we thought because he was going to shine people’s shoes, and everyone was going to love him, and he was going to get to know everyone. That’s why we kind of we kept we hung onto that for a long time. We had him be people’s assistants, and it was like, ‘Oh, he’s meeting people,’ and everyone who meets him loves him. At one point like in Season 2, Season 3, we were like, ‘Andy is going to be the mayor someday,’ and he was going to be this real like old-timey 19th century [scenario], like, ‘He started as the shoeshine boy!’