We have to talk about Leslie and Ben and why you decided ultimately that they should break up.
There are several things going on here. There's a meta discussion here, which I find interesting, which is that people now in this day and age are interested in articles like this one that peek behind the curtain, and want to know how TV shows are made and the decision-making. I think that's great, and it's something I'm interested in. But there's some aspects where the answers to things can appear cynical or calculated. Certain people who really loved the Jim and Pam storyline in "The Office," if they had been privy to the decision making process in the writers room, it would have made it a little less enjoyable. Because there's not just what is right for the characters, but what is right for the show and other considerations going into it. It's not just a perfect, delicate beautiful butterfly that's slowly unfolding its wings over the course of an entire season of TV.
All that having been said, our approach to Leslie and Ben was that we were going to try as much as we could to let the characters dictate their actions. We didn't want them to do anything that seemed too forced, or we were doing it because it was convenient to us. We just wanted to say, "Okay, this is Leslie Knope, and she's presented with this specific opportunity and this dilemma and this guy," and we spent 50% of our time in pre-production debating what would we do. We talked to Amy about it, we talked to Adam about it, we talked to NBC about it, I talked to my wife about it until I drove her crazy. And what I ultimately felt was that she would not turn down her dream, which we know was her dream since she was a little kid. She would not turn down her dream for a guy, even if he was a great guy. She and Ben had been only dating for a few weeks in the show's timeline when she was approached. And even if it had been longer, I felt that this was Leslie's dream, and she's passionate about it, and if she had to make a choice between running for office or continuing to date a guy, she wouldn't date the guy. Once I settled on that, I said we had to figure out how to make it clear to the audience that that was the dilemma. A lot of the work we did on the script was making it clear that there's no secret loophole. There's no surprise deus ex machina, "Don't worry, you can have everything you want!" story move. We made clear that this was the case, that she doesn't have the choice, and then we made it clear how much she wished it was a choice. She really likes this guy, and it really is a painful for her to make.
Source: Full interview @ HitFix
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