Parks and Rec: The Underdog TV Show That Lit'rally Inspired a Vision for a Better America - Tapa dura

Keishin Armstrong, Jennifer

 
9780593854518: Parks and Rec: The Underdog TV Show That Lit'rally Inspired a Vision for a Better America
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ISBN 10: 0593854519 ISBN 13: 9780593854518
Editorial: Dutton, 2026

Sinopsis

From the New York Times bestselling author of Seinfeldia, the definitive story of the creation and legacy of Parks and Recreation, with exclusive interview content from its cast, crew, and creators

More than fifteen years after Parks and Recreation premiered, it has become a streaming staple. It’s beloved for its jokes, characters, and expressions—the show even created a now widely observed holiday, Galentine’s Day. How did it all happen and how did the show transform from a ratings disappointment into a cult classic? Pop culture historian Jennifer Keishin Armstrong reveals all this and more in the authoritative history of the show, which is as full of humor, optimism, and heart as Parks and Recreation itself.

Through new and exclusive interviews, as well as deep insight and smart and entertaining pop culture analysis, Armstrong tells the story of how Parks and Recreation came to be: how it grew from The Office’s success and Obama-inspired optimism, how producers assembled one of TV’s most lovable casts but barely survived a mediocre first season, how the show found its voice by getting more political and more romantic, and how it became a cultural force despite middling ratings during its network run, going on to become a television savior of the Trump era and a modern classic.

Lovingly told and deeply researched, Parks and Rec is the ultimate history of the show that taught us what’s important in life: friends, waffles, and work.

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Acerca del autor

New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Keishin Armstrong has written nine books, including Seinfeldia, Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted, Sex and the City and Us, and When Women Invented Television. She is the cofounder of the “Ministry of Pop Culture” Substack and a former local newspaper reporter. She lives in New Paltz, New York.

Fragmento. © Reproducción autorizada. Todos los derechos reservados.

1"The Nobility of Working Really Hard for Your Little Tiny Slice of America"Creating the ShowMike Schur rushed into Greg Daniels's office on the set of The Office. The entire space was like a set of office nesting dolls: offices in offices from The Office, offices pretending to be offices, offices that actually were offices. Because of this, you can imagine Daniels's office fairly accurately by picturing Michael Scott's office on The Office, with its blinds and cheap particleboard furniture. Here, real life and fiction blended easily.Schur couldn't wait to tell Daniels the news he'd just heard: Amy Poehler was leaving the cast of Saturday Night Live. Schur and Daniels had continued to brainstorm concepts for their Office spin-off, but the idea they felt momentum behind was not an Office spin-off: a show that would focus on a small-town government official. NBC was waiting for their big Office follow-up, ready to rush whatever Schur and Daniels came up with straight into production for a post-Super Bowl premiere set for January 2009. But the producers had yet to hit upon a galvanizing moment, the feeling that they were onto something ready to present to the network.They continued to brainstorm on the government idea, a show that, in Daniels's mind, would center a "gullible, optimistic" bureaucrat: "She's really into the power of government, and I thought it would be funny to contrast her with a libertarian who didn't believe in government at all," he says. This concept could match well with Poehler, with whom Schur had worked at SNL.Poehler as a sitcom star made a lot of sense to Daniels. Both Steve Carell and Tina Fey had become major stars in NBC's strong comedy lineup, on The Office and 30 Rock, and Poehler had also come out of the Second City improv troupe around the same time."Carell had proven to be such an amazing leader, partly because he had all these years of improv experience," Daniels says. "Amy seemed like somebody who had the same heft as Carell, who could lead the show."Hearing about Poehler's sudden availability felt like the glimmer of a real vision for Schur. He had started as a writer at SNL in 1998 and met Poehler when she joined the show in 2001. Poehler, a petite blonde who was now thirty-six, had become one of Saturday Night Live's standouts over her seven seasons, known for her impressive range. She could play a Boston teenager; pop stars Avril Lavigne, Madonna, and even Michael Jackson; conservative commentator Ann Coulter or, on the other side of the political spectrum, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. She became part of the series' first all-female team to host its faux-news segment, "Weekend Update," with Fey, her frequent comedy collaborator. Now, at the end of SNL's 2007-2008 season, Poehler was planning to leave the legendary sketch comedy show that had made her famous (though she'd stay on for the fall of 2008 for the impending presidential election).Like Daniels, Schur thought she would make a stellar sitcom lead. That is, if they could get her. As far as Schur was concerned, Daniels ranked as the No. 1 reason The Office was so successful, but No. 2 was Carell. As cringeworthy boss Michael Scott, Carell carried the show with his underlying intelligence and his comedic talent, but behind the scenes, his grounded personality, work ethic, and dedication were also key. "He's just a very, very sturdy, load-bearing wall on a TV show," Schur recalls. "And those people are very rare. There aren't that many people who can be at the center of a giant ensemble comedy like that."Parks and Recreation grew from seeds cultivated at The Office and cross-pollinated with Obama-era spirit.Its existence became a foregone conclusion when, in 2007, NBC hired a successful agent-turned-producer named Ben Silverman as cochair of its entertainment division. He would be taking over for Kevin Reilly, who hadn't managed to reverse the network's downward trajectory. The thirty-six-year-old wunderkind's expertise became widely coveted after he, as an agent, shepherded hits such as Ugly Betty and The Office to television, translating other countries' shows to American audiences.As one of Silverman's first acts in his new job, he had asked Daniels, who had adapted the British Office for American audiences, to make a spin-off of the breakout show for the 2008-2009 television season. As talks progressed, the offer crystallized: thirteen episodes in the second half of the season, starting with a premiere in the hottest slot on TV, after the Super Bowl in January 2009.Optimism was taking hold at NBC and in America. The nation was on its way to electing its first Black president, the handsome and charismatic Barack Obama (a man who literally espoused "relentless optimism" in a 2017 speech). The Great Recession remained many months in the future. And The Office, a show about mundane office workers with regular-person problems, was hitting new heights in its third season on NBC, a bright spot on an otherwise struggling network. The network had ordered six "supersize" forty-minute episodes of the season's total of twenty-five, one of their latest promotional gambits and a major vote of confidence. Surely the guy who had brought The Office to America could turn things around for NBC.The Office's American life began with a six-episode first season in 2005. Along with the British series' cocreators, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, Silverman-who had secured the American rights while an agent in England-had chosen Daniels, cocreator of the animated series King of the Hill, to make it for US television. Daniels cut a professorial figure, standing six feet two with dark, slightly graying hair, a light beard, and, often, dark-framed glasses.The American version employed a mockumentary style, like the British version, this time to chronicle the workday lives of the employees at the Dunder Mifflin paper company branch in Scranton, Pennsylvania. The first season, largely a remake of the first UK season, struggled tonally, and it landed with a thud, ranking No. 102 of 156 network shows that year. The cast and the creative team did not believe they had a hit on their hands before it aired. "There was a moment when we were shooting the last episode [of the first season], where the cast was sort of huddled outside, and everyone was a little bit glum because it was our last week of shooting," remembered Schur, who was writing for the show at the time. "Even though the show wouldn't air for months, everyone kind of felt like, there's no way this ever works."Schur, then twenty-nine years old, was six feet tall and had a thicket of dark hair, a boyish face, and an impish smile; he was prone to wearing Converse sneakers, jeans, and fleece jackets. He was one of three junior writers who supported Daniels, along with Mindy Kaling and B. J. Novak, both of whom also appeared on the show. Schur had a different vibe, coming from Saturday Night Live as a writer, just as Daniels had. "We hit it off pretty early," Daniels recalls of Schur.By the third and fourth seasons, The Office had found its own voice and steadily grew to become one of the biggest and best comedies on television at the time. Its focus on regular characters at a regular job resonated with viewers, and the mockumentary format, with characters often talking to the camera as if being interviewed by an unseen producer, rhymed with the zeitgeist as reality TV invaded airwaves using a similar technique. Thus Silverman's excitement over the possibility of a spin-off, though Daniels felt too overwhelmed by The Office's speeding train to think it through much and he generally resisted the idea of trying to clone success.But after twelve episodes of the fourth season of The Office had been shot, the Writers Guild of America decided to go on strike, shutting down productions across Hollywood. During the strike, as Daniels had more downtime to think, he widened his view. He realized that any show, any kind of sitcom that had existed in the past, "you could do a mockumentary treatment of it and refresh. So I got open to doing another mockumentary." He adds, "And Ben was begging for a spin-off."He didn't want to do the project alone while running The Office, so he looked around his writers room for people he could develop with. His most senior writers were Jen Celotta, Mindy Kaling, Paul Lieberstein, B. J. Novak, and Mike Schur. Kaling, Lieberstein, and Novak appeared as series regulars on-screen, so they couldn't leave. He decided to start with Schur, who had gotten to the show a year before Celotta. Schur, he says, "felt to me like he was ready to run a show."As Daniels and Schur walked the picket line together one day in the fall of 2007, Daniels said, "Hey, NBC wants me to do a new show. Would you want to do it with me?"Schur, then thirty-two, couldn't believe that his idol, the man he regarded as the best in the sitcom business, was asking him to collaborate. And on a show with the rare privilege of getting directly on the air, in the prime spot after The Office, rather than having to go through a laborious pilot process. Daniels would step down from day-to-day showrunning at The Office to devote more time to the project, leaving Celotta and Lieberstein in charge; Daniels would then mentor Schur toward becoming the new series' showrunner and its driving creative force. They would develop the show over the next year, and then it would debut after the 2009 Super Bowl.Though Schur was nervous, he said yes. "You'd have to be an idiot to say no," he says. That decision would change his life and recalibrate TV's appetite for unflinchingly empathetic comedy not undercut by the cringe factor that The Office had made so popular.Their considerable mission: an unspoken request to live up to the network’s biggest recent hit. They needed to reproduce the magic of The Office, capturing a setting that people related to and filling it with charismatic actors playing amiable but flawed characters. They had to find another Steve Carell to be at the center, no small feat; Carell imbued The Office’s boss character, Michael Scott, with pathos despite his bigotry and buffoonery.When the writers' strike ended, Daniels and Schur began meeting for breakfast a few times a week at Daniels's favorite restaurant in Van Nuys, California-NORMS-pitching each other idea after idea.Schur took notes as they worked together and still refers to them to this day: "Greg understands that you have to generate dozens and dozens and dozens of ideas just to get to the ones that are good," Schur says. "It requires a tremendous amount of generating ideas, throwing them away, revising them, coming back to them, remembering little bits of them that are worth pursuing."Raised in West Hartford, Connecticut, Schur graduated in 1997 from Harvard University, where he was president of The Harvard Lampoon. (Daniels had served on the same staff in the eighties alongside future late-night host Conan O'Brien.) Like many Lampoon grads, Schur landed on the writing team at Saturday Night Live. In 2001, he became the producer of the show's trademark "Weekend Update" faux-news segments. He won his first Emmy in 2002 as part of the writing team and left the show in 2004 to move to Los Angeles with his then-girlfriend, J. J. Philbin, a fellow TV writer who was working on the teen drama sensation The O.C. at the time. After interviewing with several shows, he secured a position at The Office.Now, as he and Daniels pondered what could be Schur's biggest career move so far, they felt stymied by the concept of a spin-off. Still, they dutifully came up with a few spin-off ideas, the most promising being a series that centered Ed Helms's character, Andy, from The Office with a new, quirky family living in the suburbs, inspired by the progenitor of the reality genre, the 1970s PBS documentary An American Family. It would, like The Office, use the mockumentary format, and they envisioned calling it American Family. They would make Andy's family the most average family in America-with the most common number of kids, living in the most average city, with the most average income.Other ideas included a show about Jim and Pam's family, a show about Dwight on his beet farm, or a show about Craig Robinson's rule-following warehouse foreman Darryl. None seemed quite right to Daniels and Schur. For starters, they could not take Jim and Pam, played by John Krasinski and Jenna Fischer, or even Dwight, played by Rainn Wilson, off The Office. And the other ideas just didn't feel inspiring. They worried, in fact, that with any of these ideas, they would be "robbing the mothership" of colorful characters who might not hold up as leads, Schur says.The bit about the average family, however, came closer to something that would inspire them: What if the show were about an average town instead? So many shows were set in exceptional cities like Los Angeles and New York, but that wasn't where most Americans lived. What if they could see their own town reflected on a major network series?From there the producers riffed on doing something about local government. Daniels thought there were two kinds of government narrative: the politician or the small bureaucrat. Since the politician had been done plenty, Daniels liked the idea of focusing on a small bureaucrat. "We were trying to build the character of a very government-believing, optimistic bureaucrat who was taking herself very seriously," he says. "And in order not to repeat a lot of the real estate that The Office was taking up, we thought it would be good to center it around a female character."Daniels still liked the family idea. But Schur latched on to the government idea, particularly as a fan of The West Wing and of Robert Caro's The Power Broker, a behemoth biography of Robert Moses, the urban planner who shaped mid-century New York City to extreme degrees while never holding elected office. That was fine, Daniels figured. He could do the family one with Celotta next.The stage was set. It was time to move forward. In the early spring of 2008, Schur called Poehler from his office to tell her about the new show he was working on, with only the vaguest idea of what it might be about. He wanted to know: Did she maybe want to star in a sitcom? One that was made by the people behind The Office?Poehler, for her part, had been preparing to leave SNL for a while. That was not only because she had been on it for seven years but also because she was starting a family with her then-husband, actor Will Arnett. She knew she would have to abandon the weekly grind of a live sketch-comedy show that airs at 11:30 p.m. Eastern time to become a mother.

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Editorial
Dutton
Año de publicación
2026
Idioma
Inglés
ISBN 10 
0593854519
ISBN 13 
9780593854518
Encuadernación
Tapa dura
Número de páginas
320
Contacto del fabricante
Dutton
https://www.penguin.com/dutton-childrens-overview/

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Otras ediciones populares con el mismo título

9781529977936: Parks and Rec: Lit'rally the Inside Story of America’s Great Underdog Sitcom

Edición Destacada

ISBN 10:  1529977932 ISBN 13:  9781529977936
Editorial: Ebury Spotlight, 2026
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