Can you believe it’s been 15 years since Parks and Recreation premiered on NBC?
To celebrate, the cast and crew shared some little-known facts about the making of the show in a new oral history published in The Independent. Amy Poehler dropped some especially shocking news about the antics that she and Nick Offerman got up to behind the scenes.
“Nick and I used to do a thing every year for the blooper reel where we would end a scene by making out,” she revealed. “And the crew would hate it.”
Offerman famously played Leslie Knope’s coworker, a “right-of-center libertarian who doesn’t believe in anything that she’s doing,” as series creator Michael Schur phrased it.
Though Poehler’s character canonically ends up with Adam Scott‘s character, the equally straight-laced Ben Wyatt, it is hilarious to imagine what could have been.
“Everybody hated it and it really made us laugh. It was like watching your aunt and uncle making out or something,” Poehler said.
Poehler only had praise for her former co-star, whom she later continued working with on the reality competition series Making It. On Parks and Rec, she said, “Working with Nick was a gift.”
“I would literally often be poking, pushing or getting in his space physically,” she recalled. “Nick’s a big imposing guy, even though anyone who knows him knows he’s a giggly softy, but he has a lot of typically masculine qualities – he can build a boat and has a mustache. It was really fun to dance with him as a character and a person.”
The cast and crew also spoke candidly on how difficult it was getting the show off the ground when it first premiered in 2009.
“In the beginning we were fighting for survival. We had a really bad launch, in my opinion. We were kind of mislabelled when we first came out, as an Office spin-off, which we were not,” Poehler said.
Rashida Jones credited the show’s success to streaming platforms, saying, “There were some critics who championed us but the [viewing] numbers were not an indication that it was widely watched. It really took streamers to make the show as beloved as it is now.”
Schur even confessed that he feared he had “ruined” Poehler’s career with the show.
“It was a nightmare for a long time. When the show started, nobody liked it. For about two months when we were making the first six episodes I couldn’t sleep because of the pressure. I thought: I’m going to be the asshole that ruins Amy Poehler’s career. She was coming off one of the most successful runs on SNL history and was one of its most beloved cast members,” he said.
“I was convinced the story was going to be: ‘Everything was going great until she met Mike.’ It was the most scared I’ve ever been professionally, and it wasn’t until the second season where I could sleep again,” Schur confessed.
