Inside Parks and Recreation

Saturday, November 14, 2009
7:00 pm PT
Los Angeles

Pawnee, Indiana, seriously brought the funny to Beverly Hills as the cast and creative team of Parks and Recreation appeared at the Paley Center to discuss the creative process behind the NBC Thursday night hit. The panel, expertly moderated by the Surf Report’s talented Diane Gordon, was preceded by a preview screening of the then-unaired “Hunting Trip” episode.
 
The sold-out audience of fans included several representatives from local, “real-life,” City Park & Rec departments eager to share their own war stories with the game cast. The consensus amongst the city cognoscenti is that the sitcom is right on the mark in terms of the often unbelievable antics of local government. During the interactive Q&A several audience members commented that they felt Parks and Recreation’s writing staff had somehow installed video cameras in the offices of local city departments to come up with plot points for the series, now in its second season.
 
Series star Amy Poehler noted how much she’s enjoying the challenge of playing “Leslie Knope” and tapping into Leslie’s “captain's spirit of wanting the team to succeed . . . being the person who gets to say things are gonna be okay.”
 
Chiming in about his role in the series, Aziz Ansari donned a faux British accent and noted, in jest, that when the producers called him about the role, he was worried about doing an American accent so he called up his friend Ewan McGregor and asked him what to do. Ansari recalled attending a Paley panel celebrating The Wire and being dumbfounded when so much of the cast of the gritty HBO series were British.
 
Though much of the cast comes from an improv background, including Poehler who is a member of the Upright Citizens Brigade, the actors were quick to give praise to the series talented writing staff, many of whom were in attendance, and to creators/executive producers Greg Daniels and Mike Schur. Daniels noted the mock documentary style of the series takes into account improvisation and the actors always give the editors so many choices to work with.
 
Producer Dean Holland spoke of the difficulty of editing the shows down to 22 minutes because he hates to cut out anything good, but is forced to do so for time. Here’s hoping some of those choice moments end up as part of the series’s growing selection of exclusive online content.
 
As the audience gathered at the Center would certainly attest, Parks and Recreation’s gifted cast and creative team is helping to put the “must-see” back into NBC’s Thursday night comedy block.