Parks and Recreation manages to give cockeyed optimism a good name—small govern ment, not so much.
Well, at the end of the day, the show is just a workplace character comedy. You hopefully kind of like these characters. But the setting is a small fictional Indiana town, and creators Mike [Schur] and Greg [Daniels] and myself were interested in following characters who have a small amount of power. I started the show right after Obama was elected, when it was all “Yes we can!” and “Let’s do this!” And there’s certainly a lot of comedy to be had in the reality of how slow things move [in government], how little changes, how hard it is to change things. Like, even to get a park built in your town becomes your life’s work.
For your ever earnest Leslie Knope, it’s getting a massive hole filled in.
Yeah. And so the comedy is the minutia and politics that go along with city hall. Leslie is the woman who still believes one person can make a difference.
And she does!
Yes, she does. It’s one woman’s struggle. She believes!
Tell us about the photos of the women in Leslie’s Parks and Recreation office.
Yeah, the women who have come before her.
Whose idea was it to decorate with photos of women in government?
That was Mike Schur’s idea, although I think set dressing started to put them there. It was really fun, because the show is shot in a mockumentary style, so we spend a lot of time in the space in rehearsal, and every day there would be a new person in there. “Oh, there’s Sandra Day O’Connor; there’s Madeleine Albright; there’s an unidentifiable suffragette; there’s Condoleezza Rice; there’s Nancy Pelosi; there’s Janet Reno; there’s Sarah Palin. Hillary has a very prominent place…in Leslie’s office and in my heart. If you notice, Leslie’s picture is right up there among them—she wants to be one of them. And on the wall is a picture of a young girl of seven or eight, which is actually me in front of an American flag next to the Liberty Bell during the Bicentennial.
How much does Parks and Recreation hate the library?
The library represents that branch of government that’s like the smart kid—the teacher’s favorite. And the library always wins. They get whatever they want. Everybody loves them—nobody can say anything. People who work in the library think they are so much better than everyone else. And what’s really funny is we’ve been doing Q&A’s about our show, and people from local governments have said, “You guys nailed it about the library.” We were just making it up as a joke on the show, but I guess everyone hates the library.
Source: LA Times Magazine
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