In a New York magazine article, reporter Will Leitch discusses a number of topics relating to Parks and Recreation, including Amy Poehler’s character, Leslie Knope, and the show’s poor focus group results. (Exec producer Michael Schur assures that the show had already undergone “four or five complete edits… by the time (they) got the focus-group results back.”)
In addition, Leitch quickly compared Parks and Recreation with its sister comedy, The Office, before dissecting its premise:
On The Office, employees are shiftless, lazy, and uninspired by their work, so nothing gets done. On Parks and Recreation, it’s the opposite: Idealistic wannabe politicians and concerned citizens strive to make the world a better place, and keep getting rebuffed by democracy. (Michael) Schur says that when he was doing initial research, he talked to urban planners in Claremont, California, about the show’s central conceit of Knope trying to transform an abandoned construction site into a city park.
Was Schur’s idea that the project would end up Godot-ian in its inertia—the joke is that the Pawnee Parks and Recreation Department can’t get it started, let alone completed—realistic? The Claremont employees laughed, because that very week, they were breaking ground on a new park. The time between project conception and initial assembly? Eighteen years. “We thought, Okay, that’ll work,” Schur says. “If our show’s on for eighteen years, we’ll be pretty happy.”
Link: Can Amy Poehler’s Parks and Recreation resurrect NBC? No pressure or anything…
