Parks & Rec Season 1 Had Twice the Episodes Until Amy Poehler’s Casting

The first season of Parks & Recreation was going to consist of twice as many episodes until Amy Poehler was cast in the lead role. Co-created by Greg Daniels and Michael Schur, Parks & Recreation premiered on NBC in April 2009 and ran until 2015. The NBC sitcom focused on Leslie Knope (Poehler), a mid-level bureaucrat in the Parks Department of Pawnee. Taking place in a fictional Indiana town, the show featured an ensemble cast and would grow into an immensely popular comedy.

Parks & Recreation season 1, however, got off to a rough start. Reviews were lukewarm, while viewership largely declined over the course of its six episodes. Speaking with Rob Lowe, who portrayed Chris Traeger in the show, Schur reflected on the difficult beginnings of the series he helped to develop.

In an interview on the Literally! with Rob Lowe podcast, Schur explained how the show’s first season was originally going to be very different. The biggest change ultimately came down to the decision to select Poehler for the lead role. The decision ended up altering several key facts about comedy in the short-term, including the episode count and even its premiere date. You can read Schur’s full comments below.

“The pilot was going to air after the Super Bowl. It was going to be the Super Bowl, then The Office and then Parks and Rec was going to launch that night, y’know, to whatever, 28 million viewers. But Poehler was pregnant and she was due to give birth literally the week we would have started shooting the pilot. And so, it was like… “Well, oh, well, I guess we can’t have her in it.” And then we Greg and I kept developing the show and we kept just having this feeling of… “like, who else, though? Like who else can do this?” Like, we just don’t know anybody else. We can look, but I don’t think we’re going to beat Amy Poehler. So, Greg and I made what at the time seemed like an insane decision, which was, instead of giving us 13 episodes guaranteed, the pilot airing after the Super Bowl, we will voluntarily cut our order to six and debut three months later.”

Parks & Recreation took a temporary hit in order to include Poehler in the cast. Having the Super Bowl as a lead-in unfailingly leads to giant ratings. Shows, such as Grey’s Anatomy and Glee, have garnered remarkable numbers after following the Super Bowl. The Office, which Schur also worked on, did its biggest numbers with the episode “Stress Relief” after having Super Bowl XLIII as the lead-in program. The episode, which aired as a full hour, took the coveted slot that would have gone to Parks & Recreation, netting close to 23 million viewers. Though the premiere of Parks & Recreation was deprived of an important boost right out of the gate, it wasn’t the only short-term sacrifice which the series had to make.

In the eyes of many viewers, and as Schur himself concedes during his conversation with Lowe, the first six episodes of Parks & Recreation were hardly indicative of what the comedy was capable of at its absolute best. The jokes could often be sluggish and the characters that fans would come to love were still in the process of being sketched out. It might have been the case that more episodes would have resulted in a somewhat more memorable first season. But, with the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear that holding out for Poehler helped to turn the show into a modern comedy classic. After all, her portrayal of Leslie Knope is a big part of why the series worked so well.

Source: Literally! with Rob Lowe

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Abdullah Al-Ghamdi
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Abdullah Al-Ghamdi joined Screen Rant in August 2019, focusing on movie and television news. In January of the same year, he wrote a 3500+ word piece on why Primo Colón is underrated. He considers it his finest work. When he’s not arguing for the merits of his favorite wrestler, he can be reached at: [email protected].

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