“Parks & Recreation” may have begun as a The Office spinoff, but it ended its seventh season on its own delightful, lauded terms. At Uproxx, Ashley Burns and Chloe Schildhause compiled a spoiler-free oral history of “Parks & Recreation,” the biggest little show that could. This one’s for you, Pawnee.
On positive comedy: A lot of comedy seems negative and built on conflict and that stuff can be really funny, but if you look at some shows, sometimes the characters are just mean to each other. So, one of the challenges of Parks and Rec, that I hope we met, was that the characters were friends who had conflicts that were based on personality types and not based on zingers.
On Amy Poehler’s character, Leslie Knope: After the first season we thought that Leslie was going to be more conniving and savvy about politics. But then we realized that just wasn’t a good color on Amy. It seemed better to have someone who was more into doing good with politics and wanting to be a good person in the government and that seemed more fun.
On writer’s room antics: TV writing is such a communal process, and I have much more experience being in a comedy room, and I know that comedy writing is such a communal experience that the writer of that episode definitely has a shape in that first draft, and first jokes and language of that script. But together the final version is a group effort. Always spearheaded by the showrunner, our showrunner being the amazing Mike Schur, who is the funniest, smartest, nicest man, or person, I’ve ever met in the industry. So he is the voice of Parks and Rec and together we all work with him to make that final voice.
On the last day of shooting: We arranged our schedule so that the last scenes were with the entire cast and they were on our set and not a location. We were able to all be together for the last moments of the show. It was very nice and felt very appropriate. The cast was very sad and the producers were very sad, everybody’s really sad. But sad in the best possible way. And we kept reminding ourselves that the fact that we got to be this sad means that we had a really great run. The worst thing in the world would be to shoot the final day of your show and then be like, “Get me the hell out of here.” That would have been a much sadder scenario. So it was all the good kind of sad. That’s an emotion you can deal with, when you realize that the reason you’re sad is because something great is ending.
Read the story
Like this:
Like Loading...
You must be logged in to post a comment.