![]() ![]() It, like America, has liberals, and conservatives, and people who like Twilight, and amateur woodworkers, and hip-hop enthusiasts. It has an obesity problem, because America has an obesity problem. The answer, I think, is to make sure Pawnee is not one thing. There’s no one “Brooklyn stereotype.” There are certain stereotypes about Anytown, USA - provincialism, obesity, etc., and employing those characteristics for Pawnee is something we think a lot about. We chose Brooklyn precisely because every single kind of person, every shape, size, ethnicity, and personality type, can be found in great numbers. Where do you try to draw the line, especially with something like the idea that Pawnee’s residents are fat middle Americans? If location is a major part of a show, it’s possible to risk falling into regional stereotypes. What is the right place for these characters to live? Cops in Pawnee would not make a very exciting show, probably, and Leslie Knope in Brooklyn is an entirely different animal. ![]() You just choose the location, and the specific amount of world-building, based on the themes of the show. We wanted to make use of Brooklyn’s scope and diversity (in every sense of the word) as a backdrop for police stories. Brooklyn is the exact opposite - not just because it’s a bustling metropolis instead of a sleepy Anytown, but because it’s famous and specific and well-known, which is exactly why we chose it. It began as a blank slate, and took thousands of pitches and 100+ episodes to create. With Parks, the idea was to create an entire fictional town that was a sort of “Anytown, USA.” The composition of the town has been slow, deliberate, and painstaking, in terms of fleshing out the details - the citizenry, media personalities, geography, etc. But how do you approach building your version of each sort of place? Obviously there’s a difference between setting a show in a town like Pawnee, which is real, but not somewhere a national television audience is familiar with, and Brooklyn, which is a cultural icon. Schur and I chatted about the difference between a (somewhat) blank slate like Pawnee versus a national icon like Brooklyn, how to avoid stereotypes in crafting regional shows, and whether we’ll ever get to see Dean Winters as The Vulture, the scourge of the Brooklyn Nine-Nine detectives, again. The man responsible for overseeing Pawnee’s development, Michael Schur, is tackling another challenge this fall, a riff on Brooklyn that starts in a police precinct: Brooklyn Nine-Nine. And one of the richest and most hilarious is Parks and Recreation’s fictionalized version of Pawnee, Indiana, which is full of recorder-playing cults, fast food addicts, competing tween rental clothing stores, and the most deranged Jewish family in the Midwest. But some of the funniest shows on television inhabit their own, deeply developed worlds, from The Simpsons Springfield to the pillow forts of Greendale Community College in Community. Some sitcoms take place squarely within the four-odd walls of a house or apartment complex, a legacy of the multi-camera shooting style that limited shows to a finite number of sets.
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