After the shocker on last week’s Parks and Recreation, series star Amy Poehler and writer Mike Schur hosted a press conference to give some insight on the decision to give Leslie triplets and what to look forward to next season. Poehler also warned that there are big goings on in tonight’s season finale that viewers won’t want to miss.
Leslie: Super Mom
“[I] think Leslie’s history is that she’s never met a project she couldn’t tackle and also succeed at,” Poehler explained on the decision to give Leslie triplets, “motherhood was sort of the last great frontier that we had left unexplored in her life and to us it’s purely exciting to think about her.”
“[T]his whole story came about really because we’ve been thinking about … what was the right time for Leslie to get pregnant,” Schur added. “[I]t’s very rare in real life that someone gets pregnant when everything is just lined-up perfectly. You know, when it’s like, ‘Yes, this is the exact right time given my financial situation, my career and my marriage and my living situation and all that.’ [L]ife is just a series of different, shifting sands.”
The show has already dealt with the trials of pregnancy with Anne, so they are reluctant to tread the same ground with Leslie. “I know we’re not going to go down that same route … of rehashing that experience but it is interesting to like figure out how this new stuff will integrate into her new life,” Poehler explained. “I can certainly relate to what it feels like to be working on a new job and having someone living inside of you.”
“[O]ur biggest goal always is to be surprising and different in the way that we let our stories unfold,” Shur agreed, “which is partly why we have Leslie’s pregnancy emerge in the Act 1 break of Episode 19 instead of at the very end of the season finale. That’s the way we sort of like to do things in unexpected ways and in unexpected times.”
On Season Seven
As for what’s in store next season, which may or may not be the show’s last (nothing has been definitively decided), Poehler noted, “We still have a lot more ahead of us, so I think we’re looking forward to having our seventh season. But [it’s] sad, certainly sad.”
Poehler continued, “[W]hat’s exciting about working on Parks always is that we keep moving things forward and never kind of sitting still as far as what happens to people. People leave, they get new jobs, they get married, they break up so I think it’s another example of big change happening for a lot of people and I think fans of ours will be really excited coming into Season 7 about what this season’s finale will mean so the answer is we haven’t given you any clues.”
This Week
On tonight’s special 1 hour season finale, Poehler warned, “I just want to underline that the last minute or so of our season finale, the last moments are really important and big things happen that kind of show you where we’re going and where a lot of the characters are going or shows you where they may go, so I would encourage everybody to make sure that they watch until the very end.”
Schur shared, “[I]n the finale Leslie will make a decision about whether or not to take this big job that she’s been offered and, you know, there’s some other stuff that happens involving Ben that sort of hints at a change in his life or at least a nominal change. So there’s like we there’s a lot of stories in the finale that sort of run through the whole episode and a lot of those questions will at least be partially answered by the time it’s over.”
The Parks and Recreation season six finale airs tonight at 8/7c on NBC.