Trivia / Parks and Recreation

• Actor-Inspired Element:
  • The minor character Harris is an obsessive Phish fan who is often seen wearing Phish shirts. The character was played by the late Harris Wittels, a writer for the show who himself was a massive fan of the band in real life (those shirts were his own) and even he co-hosted his own podcast about the band called Analyze Phish.
  • Chris Traeger's habit of using "literally" so often was taken directly from the producers meeting with Rob Lowe about the character, and noticing how often he uses "literally." When he left the show, they gave him a frame portrait of their notes from that first meeting with "This guy says 'literally' a lot!" in the margin.
  • Ron Swanson's carpentry hobby was due to Nick Offerman inviting the writers to his workshop.
  • Ben's love for R.E.M. (evident by "Stand" in "Requiem For a Tuesday" and his choreographed roller skate routine with Leslie to "Losing My Religion") is based on Adam Scott being a huge fan of the band himself. In 2018 he and Scott Aukerman hosted a comedy podcast dedicated to the band titled "R U Talking R.E.M Re: Me?"
• Actor-Shared Background:
  • Like Aziz Ansari, Tom is a Muslim Indian-American from South Carolina. Tom was interested in business and marketing, which was what Aziz originally studied.
  • April being of half-Puerto Rican descent. However, in the real life case of Aubrey Plaza, it's from her father's family, versus April's mother.
  • Donna evidently has relatives in Liberia; so does her actress, Retta. In fact, Retta (full name Marietta Sirleaf) is related by marriage to Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, first female President of Liberia.
• Banned in China: Sony dared not broadcast the infamous episode "Sister City" (which dealt with a very point-on parody of Venezuelan military government officers) on its Venezuelan feed, and it's very improbable that the series even airs on open networks.
• California Doubling:
  • Most exterior town scenes are shot in Pasadena. The outside of Pawnee City Hall is actually Pasadena City Hall. Lampshaded in "Pawnee Commons" wherein Ben questions the large number of palm trees found in Eagleton, which an Eagletonian explains/the show handwaves as being the result of Eagleton's unique geologic placement.
  • There are small touches that partly balance this out, by making it clear that the showrunners have Shown Their Work. For example, maps of Pawnee copy the outline of Muncie, flipped north-to-south, and in some of the show's many (many, many) drinking scenes, products from southern Indiana's own Upland brewery, such as Helios Pale Ale◊, are plainly visible.
• The Cast Showoff:
  • Chris Pratt gets to sing every now and then as Andy's the lead singer of Mouse Rat.
  • Donna sings opera during Leslie and Ben's wedding.
  • Nick Offerman is a talented saxophone player — though the writers didn't know this when they came up with Duke Silver.
• Cast the Expert: In possibly the strangest example, Jay Jackson, who plays Perd Hapley, is an actual newscaster with 22 years of experience rather than a natural actor. In fact, in every role he's done (including Dexter, Fast Five, and Scandal), he always plays a newscaster.
• Cast the Runner-Up:
  • Kulap Vilaysack auditioned for the part of April. She eventually appeared as the girlfriend of Ben's divorced dad.
  • Jim O'Heir, who plays Jerry Gergich, initially auditioned to portray Ron Swanson.
  • Nick Offerman and Adam Scott read for Mark Brendanawicz before being cast as Ron Swanson and Ben Wyatt respectively.
  • Ben Schwartz originally screen-tested for Dave Sanderson before being cast as Jean-Ralphio Saperstein.
• Casting Gag:
  • Amy Poehler's then-husband Will Arnett played a creepy Temporary Love Interest of Leslie's.
  • Ron Swanson's crazed bitch of an ex-wife Tammy Two is played by Megan Mullally, who is Happily Married to Nick Offerman.
  • Rob Lowe's character Chris Traeger has elements of a parody of the similarly morally upright and generally positive government official he played on The West Wing, Deputy White House Communications Director Sam Seaborn. Chris is much more unconsciously goofy, however.
    • Similarly, Lowe's West Wing costar Bradley Whitford appears in the episode "Live Ammo" playing Councilman Larry Pillner, who is basically an older and more world-weary version of the Deputy Chief of Staff Joshua Lyman. The two aren't shown directly interacting though.
• Corpsing: Due to the actors having a lot of leeway to improv on set, this happened a lot. Aubrey Plaza is the most prone to it; this is most visible when the camera holds on her face when Chris Pratt plays her his song "Champion of Death".
• Creator Backlash:
  • While he doesn't appear to hate the show or bear any animosity towards the creative team or his former costars, Paul Schneider (Mark) does not seem to have a lot of fond memories of his time on Parks and Rec. It's hard to blame him, considering how he was always the odd man out among the other cast members and then found himself and his character being increasingly left behind when the series found its identity in Season 2, resulting in him being (in his own words) "given a lot less to do". Still, Schneider has been pretty honest about how his experience on the show left him with a soured outlook on mainstream acting as a whole (he now selects roles in low-key independent projects and takes a lot of time off in between jobs). The creators did keep the door open for a return and planned to have Mark reappear every once in a while, but between them not being able to figure out a way to bring Mark back and Schneider not being interested in ever reappearing again, the plans fell through and Mark slid into Un-person territory from Season 3 onward.
  • The creators and cast as a whole seem to feel this way toward the first season. Aside from agreeing with the fans' consensus that the humor was weaker and the characterizations were spotty at best, they also rarely ever acknowledge it. At one point, during a panel between the cast, Greg Daniels brought up a moment between April and Andy in the episode "Rock Show", which he mentioned was in season 1, then gave a knowing pause at what he just said, causing everyone in the audience to laugh and Aziz Ansari to yell, "Don't bring up those shitty episodes, man!"
  • While still proud of the show overall, Chris Pratt admitted to becoming uncomfortable with all the jokes being made at Jerry's expense, feeling it had gotten too mean-spirited to be funny.
• The Danza:
  • Justin Theroux plays Ann's friend Justin Anderson.
  • "In Operation: Ann," one of Ann's potential suitors is a Phish fanatic named Harris, who was played by show writer Harris Wittels.
  • Andrew Burlinson plays Burly, Andy's bandmate in Mouse Rat. Late in the series it is revealed Burly is short for Andrew Burlinson. Additionally, the drummer is played by composer Mark Rivers. He is later listed in the credits as "Rivers", and the Johnny Karate episode reveals his character's name as Mark Rivers.
• Dawson Casting: At the start of the show, Aubrey Plaza was 24-25 playing 19-year-old April. Because of this fact, when Andy starts dating April, the show briefly addresses the eight-year age difference between the two. In real life, Chris Pratt is only five years older than Plaza.
• Defictionalization:
  • The Li'l Sebastian plush from "The Trial of Leslie Knope". An ad for it appeared in the bottom row of the episode's original broadcast.
  • Leslie originally wrote the book Pawnee: The Greatest Town in America in "Born & Raised". Show writer Nate DiMeo eventually wrote it for real.
  • Mayfair Games is working to make Ben's game Cones of Dunshire (from the episode of the same name) a real product.
• Deleted Scene: So very many. Although only intended to be a half-hour sitcom with 22-minute episodes, the series regularly shot enough footage for an episode twice the length. During Season 1, many of Aubrey Plaza's scenes actually got left on the cutting room floor, only to emerge when the DVD came out later.
  • Often, especially for the earlier seasons, the uncut versions of the episodes are the ones available on streaming sites like Hulu and Netflix.
• Directed by Cast Member:
  • "Correspondents' Lunch" was directed by Nick Offerman.
  • "Article Two" was directed by Amy Poehler.
  • "Farmers' Market" was directed by Adam Scott.
• Divorced Installment: Parks was originally conceived as a Spin-Off of The Office (US), even having the Working Title of "Untitled ''Office" Spin-off" for a short time after it was announced Greg Daniels and Michael Schur were working on a new show together, but that idea was quickly scrapped early on in the production process and the series was made into its own independent entity. There was still at least another attempt to connect them where the Dunder-Mifflin Scranton office's copier would break, be fixed and refurbished, and then shipped to the Pawnee Parks and Rec department, though that never materialized either.
• Dyeing for Your Art:
  • Chris Pratt was originally quite slim but decided to gain weight to play the schlubby Andy. He would then dramatically lose and gain weight throughout the show's run for other roles as his film career took off and he eventually became a genuine box office draw with Guardians of the Galaxy (2014).
  • Nick Offerman, by his own admission, "basically ate two cheeseburgers a day for seven years" while playing the meat-loving Ron Swanson.
• Enforced Method Acting: Chris Pratt revealed that when he needed to show up naked at Ann's door in "Kaboom", he was failing to elicit a proper reaction from Amy Poehler until he went completely naked without telling her^note This also got him in trouble with NBC because the fact that he got nude on set without going through proper procedure made the network liable if anyone had decided to sue for sexual harassment. The NBC legal department sent him a formal warning telling him not to do it again without permission.. Her wide-eyed shock is the take they used.
• Fake American: New Zealander Lucy Lawless as the American Diane Lewis. Lawless may have lived in America a while, but you can tell sometimes.
• Hollywood Old: In "Ron and the Tammys", Patricia Clarkson and Paula Pell play Ron's first wife, Tammy 1, and Ron's mother, Tamara Swanson. Clarkson is only eleven years older than Nick Offerman, despite the show implying her character is at least a couple of decades older than Ron. Meanwhile, Pell is only seven years older than Offerman.
• Hide Your Pregnancy: When Amy Poehler became pregnant for the second time, the producers decided to write and film as many episodes as possible before she had to go on maternity leave, rather than taking a hiatus between the second and third seasons. This resulted in increasing amounts of bump-camouflaging ruffled blouses and creative clipboard and desk placement during the first six episodes of Season 3. Unfortunately, NBC decided to push back the season premiere to January 2011, rather than the expected September 2010 premiere date, rendering the creative team's efforts unnecessary.
• Hypothetical Casting:
  • The town's mayor, Walter Gunderson, was The Ghost for much of the show. Amy Poehler said they would have liked Bill Murray for the part. Murray eventually did so.
  • According to Michael Schur, Jonathan Banks was cast as Ben's father Steve precisely because they made the character an expy of Mike Ehrmantraut.
    Schur: We were working [on] the character description of Ben's dad and I said aloud, 'He should act like Mike Ehrmentraut'. So somebody said, 'Well, why can't we just get Jonathan Banks?'"
• I Am Not Spock: Nick Offerman is so strongly associated with Ron Swanson that many people believe he shares all of the character's traits. In truth, while Offerman shares some of Ron's interests like carpentry and saxophone playing, they are very different people. Offerman has gone on record saying that while he admires the philosophy behind libertarianism, he thinks it's an ineffective ideology for actual governance.
• In Memoriam: The message at the end of the series finale saying "We Love You, Harris. — The Parks Crew" is dedicated to writer/actor Harris Wittels who tragically died on February 19, 2015, five days before it first aired.
• Irony as She Is Cast: Megan Mullally plays Tammy Two, Ron's Manipulative Bitch of an ex-wife. In real life, Mullally is Happily Married to Ron's actor, Nick Offerman.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: "A Parks and Recreation Special" has been completely unavailable on official sources following the end of the charity donation period, even on the NBC-owned Peacock service.
• No Export for You: Finally averted in the UK when BBC Four picked it up in 2013.
• Only Barely Renewed: The series had relatively low ratings for much of its run, in some cases airing as a mid-season replacement. It would often get renewed anyway because of the failure of many of NBC's other new shows. As a result, almost all of the season finales doubled as a Series Fauxnale. Additionally, Word of God states that the show's constantly uncertain future led to the relationship subplots being resolved much more quickly because the writers were unsure if it would run long enough to resolve them later.
• The Pete Best: Paul Schneider (Mark) was this, having played a fairly prominent role in the first two seasons before leaving at the end of Season 2, which was largely agreed to be the point the show was starting to figure itself out and found its own distinct identity away from its parent series, and Mark's role as the Straight Man/Only Sane Man/Love Interest of Leslie being supplanted by Ben, who was much more well-received by the fans. In addition, his role as Leslie's foil and psuedo-mentor figure gradually shifted over to Ron, as unlikely as that initially seemed.
• Playing Against Type:
  • Sam Elliott as Ron Dunn, Ron Swanson's antithesis (while Swanson is a manly, carnivorous libertarian, Dunn is a vegan New-Age Retro Hippie). Elliott is mostly known for his dramatic roles in prestigious films, so having a comedic recurring role on a network sitcom gave him the chance to show off his comedy chops.
  • The show gave Adam Scott the chance to play a sympathetic character, in contrast to the Jerkass roles he was previously known for playing.
• Post-Script Season: The show has had shaky ratings from the start and according to Mike Schur, every season finale after Season 2 (with possibly the exception of Season 5) was written in a way that it could function as a series finale in case they weren't renewed for another. As such, pretty much every season has been a post-script season. Season 7 might be the most obvious example, since season 6 ends with a Distant Finale taking place 3 years later.
• Prop Recycling: The guitar Andy plays in the COVID-19 special was originally made for when Chris Pratt hosted Saturday Night Live.
• Real-Life Relative:
  • Will Arnett has a cameo as a creepy guy Leslie dates in "The Set-Up". He was married to Amy Poehler (Leslie) in real life at the time.
  • Nick Offerman (Ron) and Megan Mullally (Tammy 2) are married in real life.^note This is why they're the only characters who appear in the same camera shot during the COVID-19 special)
  • Ron's brother Don is played by Nick Offerman's brother Matt.
  • Husband and wife Dax Shepard and Kristen Bell have both appeared on the show.
• Real Life Writes the Plot:
  • As he was filming Guardians of the Galaxy at the time, Chris Pratt was unable to gain the proper weight for the role of Andy during the London storyline, so they added an exchange to explain his sudden weight change. Being Parks, they weren't exactly concerned with making it a plausible explanation:
    Ben: So all you did was stop drinking beer?
    Andy: Yeah, I lost fifty pounds in one month!
    Ben: [stunned] How much beer were you drinking?
    Andy: I know, right! [beat] Probably too much.
  • Because everyone was in quarantine, the writers had to find reasons for the show's official couples to not appear together in the COVID-19 special, with Leslie and Ben forced to quarantine in separate states, Ann self-isolating in a separate part of the house from Chris because she's working in a hospital, and Andy accidentally locking himself in a shed away from April.
    • Ron shares screentime not with his wife and children but with Tammy II because the actors are married in real life, so she was available to appear with him.
• Referenced by...:
  • Family Guy Fanon: The Season 22 fan episode Fathers and Recreation is a play on the title of the show.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (2022) has Ben Schwartz repeating one of Jean-Ralphio's lines when Sonic goes "We're not watching Snow Dogs again, that movie is the wOOOOOooooOOOOOOOrst!"
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic has an episode titled "Marks and Recreation".
• The Red Stapler: Lagavulin 16 year old single malt Scotch whisky has experienced a surge of popularity thanks to Ron Swanson. It eventually led to the distillery's parent company hiring Nick Offerman for a series of Youtube ads.
• Saved from Development Hell: This happened with a joke. A deleted scene from a town meeting featured a citizen complaining that an old sandwich she found in the park didn't have mayonnaise, and how this failed to meet her standards of a sandwich. The creators must have really liked the bit, because the scene was worked into a future episode.
• Screwed by the Network:
  • In 2010, the show was brushed aside for mid-season replacement Outsourced, which was hated by critics and did not make it past the first season. The show's fifth season narrowly avoided being cut to 13 episodes as a precursor to cancellation, but the season was officially granted a full 22 episodes.
  • Averted with its renewal for Season 6, although the failures of every other comedy on the network and the ending of The Office forced NBC's hand. The only other comedy to survive was Community.
  • NBC got its final digs at the show by hustling it out the door, holding the final 13 episodes until the back half of the season, airing two per week and having it off the air before the end of February.
    • Not only did they blow through the final 13 episodes, but they also bumped the series finale from the show's usual 8 PM timeslot all the way back to 10 PM to make room for two hours of singing competition show The Voice. Way to Kick Them While They Are Down, NBC.
• Separated-at-Birth Casting:
  • Late in the series, Jean-Ralphio Saperstein, played by Ben Schwartz, introduces his twin sister, Mona Lisa, played by Jenny Slate. Despite the actors not being related, they practically match the trope for Half-Identical Twins.
  • During the episode "Tom's Divorce", many viewers could not help but notice that the stripper Leslie hired (played by Cheryl Texiera) to give Tom a lap dance looked uncannily like Wendy (played by Jama Williamson). Definitely deliberate on the part of the casting department.
• Serendipity Writes the Plot:
  • The London storyline came about as a way to keep Chris Pratt on the show while he was filming Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) in the UK — Peter Serafinowicz appeared on the show in that story while also being in Guardians with Pratt.
  • There's also a throwaway line in the season premiere about Andy giving up beer in order to explain Pratt's fitter physique.
  • For the filming of the Reunion Show, set during the COVID-19 pandemic, none of the actors who play the married characters are couples living together in real life. Thus, the show gives a bunch of explanations as to why they're all in different rooms — Leslie is working in D.C. away from Ben, Andy locked himself in the shed, and Ann is working as a nurse so she is self-isolating away from Chris. Meanwhile, since Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally are an actual married couple, they were able to have the bit where Tammy 2 breaks into Ron's cabin.
• Star-Making Role: For Nick Offerman, Rashida Jones (coupled with The Office (US)), Aziz Ansari, Aubrey Plaza, Chris Pratt (coupled with The LEGO Movie and Guardians of the Galaxy), Adam Scott and Retta. In other words, basically the entire cast other than Amy Poehler (who was already famous thanks to SNL) and Rob Lowe, who already had an established career.
• Throw It In!:
  • The show makes use of varying degrees of improvisation. The most frequent example are the "addressing the camera" scenes with many jump cuts between jokes; these are usually the result of letting the actors run off-script (especially with Amy Poehler).
  • Series co-creator Mike Schur also said at a panel discussion that his favorite joke in the entire series — Andy's line "Leslie, I typed your symptoms into the thing up here and it says that you might have... Network Connectivity Problems." — was made up on the spot by Chris Pratt.
• Vindicated by Reruns: Parks and Rec was never quite able to shake off the bad first impression its clumsy first season left on most critics and initial audiences that wrote it off as a pale imitation of The Office, and even after Growing the Beard in Season 2 and continuing to improve from there, it was still largely a Quietly Performing Sister Show in comparison to The Office and struggled in the Nielson ratings for its whole run on NBC, though it did manage to avoid cancellation and lasted seven seasons (125 episodes in total) thanks to its small but very loyal fanbase. Eventually, reruns on FXX and other networks (as well as help from streaming services, as the series was available on Netflix, Prime Video and Hulu until late 2020) led to good word-of-mouth and a bump in fans that missed the show's initial run. Moreover, thanks to having lasted longer than its ratings would've normally allowed, Parks has also managed to avoid the "critically beloved but short-lived" label that usually plagues shows that go through this, with most critics and TV fans considering it equal to, and in some cases, better than its parent show. Fittingly, when the series returned to NBC's hands via Peacock, it was touted as one of the freshman streamer's signature offerings.
• Word of God: Ron's nickname for Marlene Griggs-Knope was not specified in the script, and the nickname is heard in the episode as "the Iron-[bleeped] of Pawnee". According to Aziz Ansari's Twitter page, Nick Offerman improvised "the Iron Cock-Shredder of Pawnee" at the table read.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Mike O'Malley was the runner-up for the role of Ron Swanson before Nick Offerman was cast. O'Malley would later go on to portray Bill Butler in "Bus Tour".
    • Matt Walsh, Thomas Lennon and Enrico Colantoni auditioned for Ron Swanson as well before the casting of Offerman. Walsh would eventually play Leonard Tchulm in "Emergency Response".
  • Ellie Kemper screen-tested for the part of Ann Perkins before the casting of Rashida Jones.
  • Octavia Spencer read for the role of Donna Meagle before Retta was cast.
  • Originally the producers wanted Arnold Schwarzenegger to play Pawnee's Mayor Gunderson. Arnold was willing to do so, but couldn't while he was governor, so Gunderson became The Ghost instead. Gunderson did eventually appear near the end of the series, played by Bill Murray.
  • Kentucky senator Rand Paul was set to appear in an episode, but he ultimately declined.
  • Deleted scenes and DVD audio commentary reveal that several Pawnee townspeople would become more heavily recurring characters in future episodes. These characters included Conspiracy Theorist Barry, anti-parks advocate Kate Spivak, and Andy's neighbor Lawrence. When the Pit 48 plot was deemphasized in the next season, the need for these characters diminished. However, Lawrence made several cameo appearances in later episodes. Barry appears very briefly in Season 2's "Sister City", though he only has lines in a Deleted Scene.
  • Even after the original plan for P+R being a spinoff of The Office was scrapped, there was an idea to create a connection for the two, where the Dunder-Mifflin copier would break, be fixed and refurbished, and then shipped to the Pawnee Parks and Rec department. It never happened.
  • A minor one: the character that developed into Ron Swanson originally had the surname "Knope" to reflect his stance vis-à-vis government, but then the creators decided to give it to the character that became Leslie for irony.
  • Mark was originally intended to periodically return to the series with a running gag of "Why Do You Keep Changing Jobs?" to emphasize the unpredictability of working for the government, but lack of interest in the character (alongside Paul Schneider bluntly not wanting to do it) led to him being phased out of the universe entirely. Ironically, during the interview where this was stated, Mike Schur emphasized that Mark wasn't going to be wiped out of the show completely, which is exactly what ended up happening.
  • Chris' therapist Dr. Richard Nygard was going to be revealed as not actually existing, and Chris was just crazy. They ended up not going through with it, but kept Nygard as The Ghost just to have fun with the fans who were predicting it.
  • April was originally named Aubrey, making her The Danza.
• Written by Cast Member:
  • Amy Poehler wrote the episodes "Telethon," "The Fight," and "The Debate." She co-write the episodes "Second Chunce" and "One Last Ride" with Michael Schur.
  • Nick Offerman wrote Season 4's "Lucky".

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