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LOS ANGELES - Whenever the writers of “Saturday Night Live” turned out a script that took a jab at Sen. Hillary Clinton, it was Amy Poehler who got the call. She found just the right bitterness-meets-brute force to portray the former first lady in skit after skit.
Poehler returns to political humor - in a much more neighborhood way - for her new NBC series “Parks and Recreation.” The ad-libbed series from Greg Daniels and Mike Schur, executive producers of “The Office,” has Poehler playing Leslie Knope, a deputy chairwoman of the Department of Parks and Recreation Department in Pawnee, Ind.
The government-based comedy also stars Rashida Jones, Aziz Ansari and Nick Offerman.
It’s a low-level job for Knope, but that doesn’t stop her from having big-time dreams. In a weird bit of fiction-imitates-art-imitates-life, Poehler’s character holds up Clinton as one of her many role models.
“I think that Leslie looks to a lot of women in politics for inspiration, and there’s so many now. She certainly looks at a lot of those women in the media and in politics right now as kind of her heroes. So it really doesn’t kind of specifically deal with trying, in any way, to tap into any of those women specifically,” Poehler says.
At the time of this interview in January, the new comedy didn’t even have a name. It was known as “The Untitled Daniels/Schur/Poehler Show.”
The temporary designation was an example of how Poehler’s popularity has grown in the last few years. She took the following she built through “SNL,” gave it a big kick with her starring role in “Baby Mama,” and now has reached the level of stardom where a show can be sold on her name alone.
In fact, Poehler’s star has risen so high, a prime-time television series almost seems like an odd career choice. Considering that she is a new mom, a film career would have seemed the more logical path.
“The opportunity to be able to work with Mike and Greg and Rashida and Aziz and everyone who is involved in the show was absolutely the reason why I wanted to do it,” Poehler says. “I was excited about the idea of being able to turn the volume down a little bit and sit with a character for a while. ‘SNL’ is an amazing place to work, but the ideas and scenes and characters were very transient.”
Poehler’s confidence in Daniels and Schur stems from their casting of Steve Carell as the lead in “The Office” just as his star was beginning to rise. Carell and cast have improvised their way through five seasons to become one of the biggest comedy hits on NBC.
And as with “The Office,” Poehler’s series is designed to look like the footage is being collected for a documentary. For her character, Knope, that can be a detriment because she seems to speak without thinking.
“Leslie is an optimist, and she’s really ambitious, and she’s really kind of hoping that the place she is now is not the place she’s going to stay. So she’s kind of struggling to find her way in a, quote, unquote, ‘man’s world’ to try to make her mark, and along the way, she’s deluded,” Poehler says.
Poehler never planned to stay at “Saturday Night Live.” She loved the experience, but she says it was time to move on to other projects.
She’s not the first “SNL” graduate to make the move to films and prime-time television. The most obvious recent example is Tina Fey, Poehler’s “Baby Mama” co-star and the force behind the NBC comedy “30 Rock.”
Poehler’s asked if she had been waking up every morning thinking this would be the day she would show Fey she was just as good.
“That’s right,” Poehler says. Then the comedian comes out in her as she adds, “Then I turn around and I wake her up and we have breakfast together. That’s how that goes.”
It seems it isn’t only politics that make for strange bedfellows.
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PARKS AND RECREATION
8:30 p.m. EDT Thursday
NBC
