"Pilot" is the pilot episode of the American comedy television series Parks and Recreation. It originally aired on NBC in the United States on April 9, 2009. The episode was written by series creators Michael Schur and Greg Daniels, and directed by Daniels.
The episode introduces the protagonist Leslie Knope, played by Amy Poehler, as well as the other regular characters played by cast members Rashida Jones, Paul Schneider, Aziz Ansari, Aubrey Plaza and Nick Offerman. Knope is a mid-level bureaucrat in the Parks and Recreation department in the fictional town of Pawnee, Indiana. In "Pilot", Knope sets out to turn a construction pit into a park after local nurse Ann Perkins (Jones) complains about the dangerous pit during a town meeting. Her anti-government boss Ron Swanson (Offerman) reluctantly allows her to form an exploratory committee after her friend and colleague Mark Brendanawicz (Schneider) secretly intervenes on her behalf.
Daniels and Schur first started writing the script in the summer of 2008, when they were in the early stages of conceiving the series. Like the rest of the series, the pilot was filmed in the same mockumentary style as The Office, the NBC comedy series also directed by Daniels. About one month before the pilot aired, a focus group report discussing several perceived problems with the episode was leaked to the media, which led to speculation that Parks and Recreation was not ready for prime-time television. The pilot episode featured a number of cultural references to such people as Bob Knight, Larry Bird and Laura Linney, as well as female political figures to whom Leslie compares herself, such as Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, and Nancy Pelosi.
"Pilot" received generally mixed reviews, although Poehler herself was widely praised by most television critics. According to Nielsen Media Research, "Pilot" was watched by 6.77 million households in its original airing. Although it received lower ratings than the two Office episodes it aired between, television critics pointed out it achieved an identical rating to the NBC show 30 Rock, which was broadcast the same night. The pilot, along with the rest of the first season of Parks and Recreation, was released on DVD in the United States on September 8, 2009.
Plot The episode opens with Leslie Knope, the deputy director of the Department of Parks and Recreation with six years of experience in the town of Pawnee, Indiana, discussing with a documentary crew her strong belief in the power of government to help other people. Later, Leslie hosts a community outreach public forum at an elementary school along with her jaded colleague Tom Haverford. Leslie is enthusiastic despite the low turnout and angry complaints, which she describes as "people caring loudly at me". Local nurse Ann Perkins complains about a giant pit near her house, which was dug out by a condominium developer that went bankrupt in the middle of the construction project. Ann says that her boyfriend Andy Dwyer broke both his legs after falling into the pit, and she demands something be done about it. Leslie is inspired by the challenge and makes a "pinky promise" that she will fill in the pit and build a park on the land.
Leslie seeks advice from city planner Mark Brendanawicz, who feels the project would prove practically impossible due to the logistics and bureaucratic red tape, but Leslie is undeterred. Leslie later fondly tells the documentary crew that she and Mark had sex five years ago, but Mark only vaguely recalls the encounter. Leslie, Tom and uninterested intern April Ludgate visit Ann and meet Andy, a lazy and demanding musician whom she is forced to wait on and support financially. Afterward, Leslie and Ann visit the pit, which Leslie accidentally falls into as Tom and April make fun of her. Ann quickly provides medical assistance. Afterward, Leslie leaves, and Ann tells the documentary crew, "She's a little doofy, but she's sweet". Sometime later, Leslie asks her boss Ron Swanson for permission to form an exploratory committee for the pit project. Ron initially refuses, but eventually agrees to consider it so that Leslie will leave his office. Ron explains that he does not want the Parks Department to build any parks because he believes the government is a waste of money, and that all government should be privatized and run by corporations for profit. Leslie repeatedly pesters Ron about the park project, but he refuses to commit.
Meanwhile, Tom and April continue to make fun of Leslie, much to the displeasure of Mark. Mark, who tells the documentary crew he is impressed that Leslie has somehow maintained her optimism about government for six years, secretly asks Ron to give her the park project. Mark said doing so would return a favor Ron owes him for unspecified reasons. Leslie and Ann are extremely excited about the new exploratory subcommittee, and the department celebrates by getting drunk. Despite her skepticism about politics and government, a drunken Ann pledges to do whatever it takes to help get the pit filled in, "even if it takes two months". The episode ends with Ron explaining to the documentary crew how he makes his office as uninviting as possible.
Production
Conception
Immediately after Ben Silverman was named co-chairman of NBC's entertainment division in 2007, he asked Greg Daniels to create a new comedy series. Silverman and Daniels previously worked together on The Office, a half-hour comedy Daniels adapted from the British comedy of the same name by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. Daniels wrote the pilot for what eventually became Parks and Recreation along with series co-creator Michael Schur, who had served as a writer on The Office. Daniels and Schur had been considering ideas for a possible show with cast members Rashida Jones and Aziz Ansari, but the concept for the series did not form until they learned Amy Poehler could play the lead character. Once that casting was determined, the script for the pilot episode was first written in the summer of 2008 revolving around her as a city bureaucrat seeking to turn an enormous construction pit into a park. They also decided the script would include the mockumentary comedy style of The Office and, like that show, would allow for improvisation on set. However, they did not consider the script an Office spin-off and NBC officials vehemently insisted to media outlets that the show was a completely separate series, despite the similarities between the two shows.
Writing The first draft of the script portrayed Leslie and Mark as slightly less likable characters. Originally, Mark asked Ron to green-light the park project not to help Leslie, but because he was attracted to Ann and wanted another excuse to keep seeing her. These elements of the script were changed after press tours and focus group screenings. The show's writers spent time researching local California politics and attended Los Angeles City Council meetings. Daniels and Schur wanted the pilot to establish that one of Leslie's duties was talking to the public on a regular basis, and they deliberately portrayed her public forum meetings as poorly attended except by a select group of angry residents. Schur said, "I've been to some community meetings in my life, and it is often this feeling of utter sparseness. That nobody cares." In writing the script, Schur wanted Mark and Leslie to have a long history together before the events of the episode, rather than having the two characters meet for the first time on screen, which he felt had already been done in many television shows. The first shot of the pilot was originally a scene with Ann standing over the pit and staring at it with an annoyed expression, followed by a documentary interview with Ann and Andy. The opening scene was changed because Daniels and Schur decided they wanted the first scene of the series to be set in a park. As a result, the episode started with a cold open of Leslie interviewing children in a park, then using a broom to push a drunk man out of a spiral slide. Daniels had such a specific vision for the scene, he drew an elaborate and detailed storyboard sketch of a drunk man stuck in a tubular slide.
Some parts of the episode consisted of a mixture of written dialogue and comedic improvisation from the actors. In one such scene, Aziz Ansari attempts to flirt with Rashida Jones when she speaks at a Parks and Recreation public forum. The scene was included in the script, but Ansari continued to improvise long after his dialogue ended, and Jones said she found it difficult to keep a straight face during filming. Schur encouraged Ansari to continue, and suggested the line in which Ansari asks to go away with Jones for the weekend. Daniels called the scene "probably the highlight of the pilot." The ending included another example of written dialogue mixed with improvisation, when Ansari recited a list of unusual things Leslie has attempted to do while drunk. In other scenes, the written dialogue was abandoned altogether in favor of improvisation, such as the scene of Ann and Andy talking on Ann's couch after Leslie fell into the pit and injured herself. Chris Pratt improvised a number of other lines and scenes in the episode, including when Andy asked Leslie to pass him his "itch stick", which he then used to scratch under his leg cast in an awkward and disgusting way.
The pilot script included several political cultural references. Leslie compares herself to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in describing the prevalence of women in government. Leslie invokes former U.S. Presidents Richard Nixon and George W. Bush as shining examples of democracy. The episode also features several references to sports figures. Ron has a poster of Bob Knight, the famous retired basketball coach, hanging in his office. The Bobby Knight image later had to be removed from the show for legal reasons. Leslie has an autographed photo of Indiana-born basketball player Larry Bird on her desk. It reads, "To Lesly, Sink That Shot, Larry B." This is a reference to a deleted scene in which Tom reveals he has tricked Leslie into believing he has brunch with Bird once a month. Tom himself actually faked the autograph, and deliberately misspelled her name "Lesly" as a joke.
Filming Michael Schur made his directorial debut with the pilot episode. The original cut of the pilot episode was 48 minutes long, and had to be trimmed down to 22 minutes. Due to the improvisational style and hand-held camerawork of the series, a great deal of extra footage is filmed in each episode and ultimately has to be discarded for the final cut. Amy Poehler said of this, "For every show, there could probably be a second show of stuff we've edited out." Brief portions of those deleted scenes were interwoven into short montage sequences that played along with dialogue from the documentary-style interviews conducted within the episode with the characters.
Although the series shared the same mockumentary style as The Office, Daniels and Schur sought to establish a slightly different tone in the camerawork of the pilot episode of Parks and Recreation. For example, the documentary-style interviews with characters sometimes feature two separate angles on the same person, with footage of the two different angles intercut into a single scene for the final episode. This distinguishing technique was inspired by The Five Obstructions, a 2003 documentary by Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth, which Daniels watched at the suggestion of actor Paul Schneider. The pilot episode also makes use of the jump cut technique more often than in The Office. In one example from the pilot episode, a scene repeatedly jumps cuts to several brief clips in which Leslie seeks permission from Ron to pursue the pit project.