Parks and Recreation/Trivia

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Absentee Actor: Lucy Lawless (Diane Lewis) doesn't appear in Season 7 at all. There's plenty of dialogue reminding viewers that she exists and is still Happily Married to Ron, however.
  • Actor Allusion:
    • A picture of Madam Secretary on Leslie's wall. Similarly, when Leslie meets Joe Biden in the fifth season, she thinks he's going to ask her to replace "Madam Secretary".
    • Tom's angry insistence on a high thread-count in his bedsheets is a reference to Aziz Ansari's stand-up bit about buying Luxury Linens brand sheets, only to find out the package lied about the thread count.
  • Actor Shared Background:
    • Like Aziz Ansari, Tom is an Indian-American from South Carolina.
    • 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 Retta; Retta (full name Marietta Sirleaf) is related by marriage to Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, first female President of Liberia.
  • Banned in China: Sony didn't dare to 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.
  • 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.
  • Casting Gag: Ron Swanson's crazed bitch of an ex-wife Tammy Two is played by Megan Mullally, who is Happily Married to Nick Offerman.
  • Creator Backlash: It's hard to blame him considering how undercooked a character Mark was, and then later was pretty much the odd man out when the series found its identity in Season 2, but Paul Schneider has been honest in his bitter feelings about his experience on the show and that it left him with a pretty sour outlook on mainstream acting as a whole (he now selects low-key roles in independent projects and takes a lot of time off in-between jobs). When the creators kept the door open for a return, he expressed an explicit lack of interest in ever reappearing again, which may explain why Mark slid into Unperson territory from Season 3 onward.
  • The Danza: Ann's friend Justin Anderson is played by Justin Theroux.
    • "In Operation: Ann", one of Ann's potential suitors is a Phish fanatic named Harris, played by show writer Harris Wittels.
    • Andrew Burlinson plays Burly, Andy's bandmate in Mouserat. Late in the series it is revealed Burly is short for Andrew Burlinson.
  • Defictionalization:
    • The Lil' Sebastian plush from "The Trail of Leslie Knope". An ad for it appeared in the bottom row of the original broadcast of the episode.
    • Leslie originally wrote Pawnee: The Greatest Town In America in "Born & Raised". Show writer Nate DiMeo eventually wrote the real thing.
  • 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.
  • 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. Her wide-eyed shock is the take they used.
  • Fake Nationality: New Zealander Lucy Lawless as the American Diane Lewis. Lawless may have lived in America a while, but you can tell sometimes.
  • Fan Nickname: "Tammy Zero" for Ron's mother.
  • Hey, It's That Guy!:
  • Hey, It's That Voice!: The city's lawyer in "Kaboom" is no other than Sterling Archer.
  • Hide Your Pregnancy: When Poehler became pregnant for the second time, the producers decided to just 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 three. Unfortunately, NBC decided to push back the season premiere to January of 2011, rather than the expected September of 2010 premiere date, rendering the creative team's efforts unnecessary.
  • In Memoriam: The message at the end of the series finale saying "We Love You, Harris. —The Parks Crew" is dedicated to writer, actor and executive producer Harris Wittels who tragically died on February 19, 2015, five days before it first aired.
  • No Export for You: Finally averted in the UK when BBC 4 picked it up in 2013.
  • Playing Against Type: Louis CK as the awkward, shy and sweet Dave Sanderson. Louis CK is renowned for his extremely crass and cantankerous edgy humor. This may be a case of Defrosting the Ice Queen when after he leaves for San Diego, his former police chief tells Ben in "Ron and Tammy: Part Two" that Dave was the "crankiest bastard in the department" until he met Leslie.
  • Real Life Relative: Will Arnett has a cameo as a creepy guy Leslie dates in one episode. He is married to Amy Poehler (Leslie) in real life. Also, Nick Offerman (Ron) and Megan Mullally (Tammy 2) are married in real life.
  • Screwed by the Network: The show was brushed aside for mid-season replacement Outsourced (TV series), which was hated by critics and did not make it past a 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. In fairness to the network, the show's ratings have never been strong.
    • 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, they bumped the series finale from the show's usual 8 PM time-slot 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.
  • 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 in the UK — Peter Serafinowicz appeared on the show in that storyline 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.
  • Star-Making Role: For Nick Offerman, Rashida Jones (coupled with The Office), 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 already had fame from SNL) and Rob Lowe, who also already had a 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).
    • The show's co-creator 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.
  • What Could Have Been: 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 Spivack, and Andy's neighbor Lawrence. When the Pit 48 plotlines were demphasized 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 Two in the episode "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 one idea of creating 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.
  • 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 reading.
  • Written by Cast Member: Amy Poehler wrote the episodes "Telethon" and "The Fight".
    • Nick Offerman wrote Season 4's "Lucky".
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