The Untold Truth Of Parks And Recreation

It's probably no surprise that Parks and Recreation was initially conceived as a spin-off of The Office. With its low-key tone, hyper realism, and mockumentary format, Parks and Recreation looks a lot like The Office. The two hit TV series also have cast member Rashida Jones in common, and both shows sprung from the minds of Office writer Michael Schur and creator Greg Daniels. But how much do you really know about Parks and Recreation's birth story?

In 2008, reports surfaced that SNL star Amy Poehler was considering joining a spin-off of The Office, alongside comedian Aziz Ansari. Soon after, Deadline reported that Daniels resisted NBC's request for a pure spin-off in favor of a show that was just stylistically similar. At one point, that series was going to be called Public Service, before producers settled on Parks and Recreation.

The series also drew inspiration from another acclaimed NBC predecessor: The West Wing – the White House-set drama that co-starred Rob Lowe as presidential adviser Sam Seaborn. Lowe claims the brain trust incorporated his old show's DNA into his new show. "When the Parks and Recreation producers were asked to develop a spinoff for The Office, they said, 'Let's do the comedy version of West Wing," Lowe told Entertainment Weekly. "I thought, 'Wow, that makes perfect sense.' It seemed like a good fit."

Chris Pratt played lovable goofball Andy Dwyer, a role that originally wasn't supposed to last more than a handful of episodes, but according to GQ, because Pratt played the character with such "wide-eyed, open-hearted glee," producers decided to keep him on the show through its season finale.

Towards the end of Parks and Recreation's run, Pratt's star in Hollywood rose exponentially, thanks to roles in movies ranging from Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy to the Osama bin Laden drama Zero Dark Thirty. Despite becoming a mega-movie star, Pratt never considered ditching the show that made him famous. "That would never happen. I would never f**king ever leave this show!" he said at a Television Critics Association press event in 2015, per IGN.

What do the following Parks and Recreation bits have in common? An ill Chris (Rob Lowe) orders his body to "stop pooping." Andy (Chris Pratt) enters Leslie's (Amy Poehler) flu symptoms into the URL bar of a web browser and diagnoses her with "network connectivity problems." The Parks Department staff goes off the rails under the influence of the brutal liquor known as Snake Juice. Not only are these three of the funniest (and most famous) sequences in the entirety of Parks and Recreation, but they were also all improvised. 

At a cast reunion at PaleyFest 2019, creator and showrunner Michael Schur discussed "fun runs," a shooting policy wherein the crew tried to leave five minutes at the end of the shooting of a scene "for the actors to just do whatever they want." Once in a while, those improv explosions would generate new lines and new jokes, and then cast and crew would shoot the scene again with that spontaneous golden material. "It deeply bums me out that I'm a writer, and I should be able to write things that are as good as this," Schur quipped. Amy Poehler reportedly directed the episode where everyone gets drunk on Snake Juice, and the cast's wild behavior (including reserved Ron Swanson dancing while wearing a tiny hat) was all part of a concerted attempt to get Poehler to laugh.

At the end of Season 6, Parks and Recreation unexpectedly jumped three years into the future. The sudden time lapse was jarring for a number of reasons, particularly because actress Amy Poehler's character had become pregnant with triplets. As it turns out, babies played a key role in the decision to fast-forward the script. 

"I saw Amy Poehler at Aziz Ansari's birthday party and she was like, 'I'm not working with babies, so I told them we're doing a time jump so I don't have to work with babies,'" co-star Retta told Vulture. "She was like, 'I just had two kids. I've had my share of babies for the last three years. I'm not doing another year of babies. Especially triplets.'"

That decision wound up opening doors creatively for the show. "It seemed like a way to skip the slightly tired sitcom stories of, 'They're new parents and their sleepless nights are so crazy!'" writer Michael Schur told Yahoo!. "We could skip the pregnancy, the birth, all that stuff. And also just in general, the idea of Leslie taking a new job, we'd already seen that ... So it was like, 'Oh, we can skip three years of that!'"

Parks and Recreation featured another huge change in its early days. In the beginning, Leslie Knope is still into her ex, a city planner named Mark Brendanawicz, played by prolific indie movie actor Paul Schneider. As the series changed, that character grew incredibly pointless. "I signed up for a specific character that was changed in mid-season," Schneider told ScreenCrush. "And, all of a sudden, I was kind of confused and kind of having a lot less to do." 

Schneider walked away from the show after the end of its second season, which made the writing staff rethink its long-term plans. Co-creator Michael Schur told the Los Angeles Times that he'd based the Mark character on a government employee he'd met while researching the show. "His career had a very interesting trajectory, which is he worked for the government for a long time as a city planner and he got so fed up with the lifestyle and the red tape and the bureaucracy, that he ... moved into the private sector," only to get sick of that and return to government work. Schur had intended for Mark to follow a similar path over the course of Parks and Recreation.

Parks and Recreation character Ben Wyatt (Adam Scott) is a man of passion. He's really into '90s band Letters to Cleo, calzones, Game of Thrones, and table-top games. During a brief period of unemployment in Season 6, he utilizes his love of games to create "a brand-new gaming experience" — a bewildering, inscrutable, prop-heavy concoction called The Cones of Dunshire. Among its intricacies: Eight to 12 players (some of whom are "warriors," "wizards," or "mavericks") roll dice to see how many dice they'll roll. The goal is to acquire cones by building a civilization. It all seems too comically absurd to ever be a workable game, and yet people keep trying to make a real-world version of The Cones of Dunshire.

Settlers of Catan publisher Mayfair Games, which built the game at the behest of the show, even attempted a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for a retail version. It fell short of its target, but at GenCon 2014 in Indiana, Mayfair offered exactly 33 tickets to fans who wanted to play. All those tickets sold, even at a price of $100 each. Proceeds were donated to the Gleaners Food Bank of Indiana.

Generally speaking, novels are regarded as "high culture" and TV sitcoms as "low culture." Parks and Recreation is one of the classier, artistically significant TV comedies, but a sitcom nonetheless. However, it does have an episode full of references to David Foster Wallace's acclaimed, complicated, 1,079-page 1996 novel Infinite Jest. Parks and Recreation co-creator Michael Schur is a devotee of the postmodern classic, which Time called one of the best novels of the past 100 years. At one point, Schur even owned the movie rights to the book, but, seeing as how Infinite Jest is probably far too gargantuan and detailed to ever commit to film, he did the next best thing: paid tribute via an episode of his TV show. 

In the 2013 Parks installment titled "Partridge," Infinite Jest references abound. Ben and Leslie visit Ben's hometown of Partridge, Minn. (a character in Jest is from Partridge, Kan.) Ron deals with a lawsuit served by the firm of Gately, Wayne, Kittenplan, and Troeltsch (Those are all Jest character names). Ben is treated for kidney stones at a hospital named after Jest debt collector Gene Fackelman, and parents-to-be Ann and Chris take the Incandenza-Pemulis Parenting Compatibility Quiz, which also draws its name from characters in the novel.