How Parks And Recreation Almost Became A Spin-Off Of The Office

In April of 2008, writer and producer Michael Schur added a new title to his resumé after getting his start on "Saturday Night Live" and, of course, Greg Daniels' American remake of "The Office" (where Schur also recurred as Mose Schrute, the even weirder cousin to Rainn Wilson's oddball Dwight Schrute). Before "The Office" ended in 2013, Schur was pulled away to work on a show that was initially intended to be a spin-off of the mockumentary set at a Pennsylvania paper company ... a little show called "Parks and Recreation."

Wait, so was "Parks and Recreation" really originally intended to just be a spin-off of "The Office?" The answer to that, amazingly, is yes. According to an archived version of an article in New York Magazine from 2009, the year that "Parks and Recreation" premiered, when Ben Silverman took a role as the co-chairman of NBC Entertainment, the executive asked Daniels and Schur to create a spin-off of the massively popular series. As it happens, though, Schur and Daniels ended up going in a different direction, and the idea to make "Parks and Recreation" a full-on, same-universe spin-off of "The Office" was scrapped. 

As the article notes, this was an uneasy time for NBC (a lot of Silverman's other grand plans for its programming didn't take off), and while I won't pretend that "Parks and Recreation" was ever a ratings juggernaut, it became a critical darling for the network. At the beginning, though, the show did share some DNA with "The Office," and thankfully, it course-corrected before long.

All things considered, it's a really, really good thing that "Parks and Recreation" decided to take a different approach than "The Office" did, because at first, it felt too similar ... and that approach almost tanked the entire show, quality-wise. In season 1 of "Parks and Recreation," which I can confidently say sucks pretty hard (and I'm a huge fan of the overall series!) Leslie Knope, the lead character played by Amy Poehler, is sort of dumb and feckless as she tries to run the parks and recreation department in Pawnee, Indiana, and throughout it, she feels a hell of a lot like Michael Scott (Steve Carell), the dumb, feckless boss of Dunder-Mifflin's Scranton branch on "The Office." At the beginning of the show, Greg Daniels and Mike Schur simply had a lady version of Michael, and it didn't work at all.

Thankfully, they changed course, and pretty early into the show's second season, viewers like me probably noticed a change. Instead of being dopey and dumbfounded like Michael often was on "The Office," Leslie got smart ... so smart and dedicated to her job that the show identified a much funnier fatal flaw for her character. Instead of just being a clone of Michael, Leslie's biggest issue — when it came to why and how she butted heads with other characters — became that she was so obsessed with her job and so excited about working for Pawnee that she expected everyone else to be on her level. This one change made the show a million times better, but not only that, I'd argue that, by the end, "Parks and Recreation" was even better than "The Office." Here's why.

Let me make something clear: I love "The Office." It's a comfort show I return to again and again, but come on — we can all admit that, after Steve Carell left "The Office" in its seventh season, the show experienced a major downturn in quality. It eventually righted the ship just in time for its (actually very good) series finale in 2013, which featured an appearance by Carell and Dwight's wedding to his longtime love Angela Martin (Angela Kinsey). But "Parks and Recreation?" Once it got past its season 1 hurdle, the show basically just kept improving.

When Adam Scott and Rob Lowe joined the cast of "Parks and Rec" at the end of its second season as Ben Wyatt and Chris Traeger, the show found its footing for good (and sorry to Paul Schneider's Mark Brendanawicz, but that guy did nothing for the show and it's a good thing he departed during that same season). Something that set "Parks and Rec" apart from "The Office" is that the show's sunny, optimistic, and kind outlook felt very different from the often acidic, acerbic tone taken by "The Office," especially in those (honestly sort of dreadful) later seasons. 

"Parks and Rec" embraced love, friendship, and joy in one's life and work. When couples got together, like April Ludgate and Andy Dwyer (Aubrey Plaza and Chris Pratt) or Leslie and Ben, they usually got to stay together and live happily ever after; remember when the final season of "The Office" seriously tried to sell a plotline where the show's main couple Jim Halpert (John Krasinski) and Pam Beesly-Halpert (Jenna Fischer) might split up? (At least they abandoned the plan to have Jim cheat on her.) "Parks and Recreation" isn't perfect, and these days, it feels like a relic of a time gone by (specifically in its sunny outlook on national politics), but the friendships and relationships between the characters have a genuine and true sweetness to them, which just isn't always true of "The Office." Thankfully, "Parks and Rec" took a different approach ... and what we ended up with were two really good mockumentaries.

"Parks and Recreation" and "The Office" are streaming on Peacock now.