Parks and Rec

"Greg understands that you have to generate dozens and dozens and dozens of ideas just to get to the ones that are good," Schur says. "It requires a tremendous amount of generating ideas, throwing them away, revising them, coming back to them, remembering little bits of them that are worth pursuing."

Offerman learned a valuable lesson from the experience: "Me getting to taste any success in my life has everything to do with learning, on an ever-extending matriculation across my life, that my authentic self is the most valuable thing I can bring to the service of any effort, whether it's a show or a marriage or woodshop."

There's a special power in someone seeing something in you that you want to believe but may not have admitted to yourself yet.

Lowe loved it when Schur told him that their original pitch to the network had been "The West Wing but with much lower stakes." Lowe says, "It's so fucking funny. And it made me realize how much I love low-stakes comedy. There's nothing funnier than incredibly low stakes that people take seriously." Lowe's characters on both are at least a little bit similar, with Chris as the smallertime, dorkier version of the slick Sam Seaborn. Lowe puts it this way: "Chris would have been a big Sam Seaborn fan."

"I feel like our society longs for someone to have the simplicity of vision that Ron has," Offerman told Newsweek at the time. "In this day and age, we're bombarded with so much information and choice that to see this heroic edifice of a man who lives by a set of simple rules is really inspiring to me. People wish they could just say, "Yes, I want to eat red meat and only use tools and firearms. That sounds like a happy, simple life.""

"Ten years after its premiere, we're living in the world Parks and Rec helped make. It was animated by a coherent philosophy, one that was still unusual a decade ago but is now widespread. It's a worldview that fits perfectly with what American liberalism has become, a self-satisfied politics so confident in its righteousness that it can't quite believe there's anything left to argue about." Dissent magazine said