Jace Lacob talks with the creators and stars of Parks and Recreation about what’s in store for Season 4 of the NBC comedy.
Ron Tom
Poehler’s Knope will have a huge decision to make when the show returns for a fourth season, with Leslie forced to choose between her secret relationship with her boss Ben (Adam Scott) and her political aspirations. (One step on the campaign trail and skeletons begin to rattle, after all.)
“In the premiere, Leslie is forced to make a decision: does she pursue her dream of running for office, or does she stick with secretively dating her boss, which are certainly truly exclusive,” said co-creator Michael Schur. “She makes a decision and the first half of the year is that decision and the ramifications of the decision for her and for Ben, for her campaign, and everything else. Then—and this is very loose—but roughly halfway through the year something big happens and there’s a switch.”
Leslie’s campaign will play a large role during Season 4. “Again, in the premiere, she’s trying to figure out what to do,” he said. “She makes a decision at the end of the premiere, but the whole season, at some level, is going to be about that campaign and about her trying to figure out what her next step is.”
Ron Tom
When we last saw Ron Swanson, he was griping once again with his second ex-wife Tammy (Offerman’s real-life wife, Megan Mullally) before she ran off rather than come face-to-face with his first ex-wife Tammy, who will be played by Patricia Clarkson. If that’s not enough of a confluence of Tammys, we’ll also meet Ron’s mother Tammy (Paula Pell). Whew. But otherwise, it’s par for the course for Ron Swanson.
“Ron is still trying to do as little work as possible and hold down his job,” said Nick Offerman. “He does run into his first ex-wife, Tammy 1, and his mother shows up and the confluence of Tammys is quite earth-shattering. I’m surprised the building is still standing after they get through with Ron. He is raked over the coals in a whole new direction by Tammy 1 and it’s really upsetting. We take Ron to some places that I was really uncomfortable taking him. I hope he’ll forgive me.”
And, yes, Offerman insisted that those places are even darker than the landmark Season 3 episode “Ron and Tammy II,” which found Ron missing half his moustache, with his hair in cornrows, and dressed in a kimono.
“My entire body, including hair, undergoes some incredible ordeals,” he added. “It’s mighty humiliating.”
Married last season in a surprise ceremony, the two became roommates with Ben and proved that they’re not at all ready for adult responsibilities—like owning eating utensils or cleaning up after themselves. “Andy says in the premiere that he wants April to manage his life in addition to his band,” said Schur. “He’s begun to think that maybe shoe shining isn’t the only thing in the world for him to do and she makes a promise to him in the premiere about what his life is going to be like a year from now.”
As for where the two find themselves next season, Aubrey Plaza teased that April would become Andy’s “life manager.” Or as Chris Pratt put it, “She helps me get my s--- together and squares me away and makes me a better person.” But not quite an adult, just yet.
“Ben, Adam Scott’s character, is still living with April and Andy, and we deal with that a lot,” said Plaza. “You get to see the three of us existing together.” Which is sort of the point, for Pratt. “I feel like April and Andy are like two kids whose parents are out of town and we have a really spineless babysitter in Ben.”
“But April took a lot of AP classes,” Plaza chimed in, “so she’s really smart, even though she’s irresponsible.”
In a cliffhanger ending of sorts, Tom (Aziz Ansari) quit the Parks and Recreation Department at the end of last season in order to run media company Entertainment 720 with his friend (and inept entrepreneur) Jean-Ralphio (Ben Schwartz). Tom will end up back at the Parks Department, but he’s sticking around Entertainment 720 for the first few episodes, said Schur.
“He’s at Entertainment 720 for a good long while,” he said. “It’s not a big yank where, in the first episode, it’s just like, ‘Oh, he’s back and here we go.’ He’s there solidly for a while. There are several episodes that take place at Entertainment 720. We get to see his attempts at running a successful business and the various foibles and follies. I think it’s actually six full episodes at least, that Entertainment 720 is the focus of his life. So it will be a while before he’s fully integrated. “
“Fortunately, there were some episodes that we designed where we could have him interacting with the old world while still being at the world that he has started for himself. He’s involved in stories with the old gang. He’s not just off by himself the whole time: Jean-Ralphio is also there.”
Once the oft put-upon girlfriend of injured Andy, Rashida Jones’s Ann has gone through several transformations, becoming the lovelorn girlfriend of Rob Lowe’s Chris and then experiencing a sexual Rumspringa of sorts last season. So what’s up for our favorite nurse? Schur was keeping mum.
“Different characters have little mini arcs,” said Schur. “There’s a very long, slow arc for Ann about Ann’s romantic life.” Hmmm…
As for the decision to bring Ann into city hall in an official capacity last season, Schur was more forthcoming.
“It’s very funny because the idea of the show was to have disparate people from disparate worlds all kind of brought together by this one project,” he said. “I suppose because we de-emphasize the project that it became more highlighted that she was not a part of the central gang or something, but it never particularly bothered me. I mean, she dated a guy who worked in city hall for a year and her best friend worked at city hall and the hospital is right around the corner from city hall. So to me, it was never an issue, but I can understand how audiences would be like, ‘Just make her work there.’ Why not? So we finally did that.”
Two of the best additions to the show have been the tag-team state budget auditors Ben and Chris. Schur said that the writers were designing a character for Adam Scott when they learned that Rob Lowe was available. They ended up creating two new characters in the end, “shooting for the moon,” to bring them both in.
“They serve very different functions,” said Schur. “Adam is obviously a romantic interest for our lead character and Rob is a romantic interest for everyone on earth, male or female. He also serves this very important function of being everybody’s boss. Because Ron hates the government, doesn’t really work that hard, and intentionally wants things to fail, we needed a guy who was actually a boss, who was a grownup, and that’s what Rob has been, which is great because we used him to develop a problem for Leslie and Ben’s relationship. We wouldn’t have been able to do that if we didn’t have a boss.”
“Also, they’re just two funny guys. They’re great actors and they’re funny. It was really fun, at the very end of Season 2, after 30 episodes, to suddenly have a new spark of two new awesome actors, two new male leading male types.”
Chris Haston
Reports have indicated that Ann’s ex-boyfriend Mark (Paul Schneider), once also the object of Leslie’s unrequited affections, will make an appearance in Season 4, after he left his job amid the budget crisis at the end of the second season. So will he be returning this year?
“Possibly,” said Schur. “It was our goal to get him back for an arc for Season 3, and then Season 3 was cut short and so we didn’t have time. But, it’s still out there, this idea that we’ve had for a while. He went to work for a construction company in town, and so at some point their worlds are going to intersect, hopefully, and we’ll get him back and check in. “
While we hope the end of Parks and Recreation is still several seasons off, Schur already has an idea that might make its way into the series finale, whatever that might be.
“The original idea for the show was that in the pilot that this eyesore, this community problem, brought a whole bunch of people together, and those were the people you would be following…Over the course of the show, the idea was that in the background of the show would be this very long-term project. It takes years and years and years to get a park made, which is funny to me…We did an episode called ‘Kaboom’ in the beginning of Season 2 where we filled in the hole and made it a lot, and the idea of that was to signal to the audience, ‘Don’t worry. We’re not going to spend every episode or every moment doing nothing but focusing on this one problem. There will be many problems and there will be many different sources of comedy.”
“It’s still my intention that the idea is that the pilot was about finding this giant hole in the ground and that maybe the series finale, whenever that is, hopefully many years from now, is the ribbon-cutting for the opening on that park,” continued Schur. “It’s still a project that Leslie cares about and wants to do. In order to help launch our show and signal the correct things to the audience who are watching it, we just moved away from that in order to send that message, and we’ll circle back eventually, I think.”
