Amy Poehler Switches to New Series

Robert Philpot - Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Amy Poehler's new TV series debuts April 9. But it doesn't have a title yet. Or even a produced episode.

In fact, right now, all it has is a script, sent to journalists attending the Television Critics Association press tour with an admonition to keep it off the Internet. Depending on where you look, the current appellation assigned to it is either Untitled Mockumentary About a Local Public Works Project or Untitled Daniels/Schur/Poehler project, with the other two surnames representing co-creators Greg Daniels and Michael Schur, who bring to the project the same skewed sensibility they bring to The Office.

The untitled, unproduced nature of the series is a little surprising, considering that the project was announced last year, months before Poehler's departure from Saturday Night Live, where she spent seven years before leaving last fall. But Daniels had a simple explanation for the lack of title: He had to present the show to TV critics before he could think of one.

Poehler was ready for the tempo change from Saturday Night Live, where she co-anchored Weekend Update and played dozens of characters, most notably Hillary Clinton.

"I was excited about the idea of being able to turn the volume down a bit," she told TV-beat reporters, "and stick with a character for a while. SNL is an amazing place to work, but the ideas, themes and characters are very transient."

In the sitcom, Poehler plays Leslie, the deputy chairwoman of the Department of Parks and Recreation of Pawnee, Ind. She's ambitious -- she wants to be U.S. president someday -- earnest, and a little clueless. She gets involved in an effort to turn a 15-foot-deep pit into a new park. That project doesn't run smoothly -- just like a lot of real-life city projects.

"When we were doing research, we went to Clairemont, Calif.," Schur said, referring to a San Diego-area town. "We met with some of the people in the government there. And we pitched them the idea for the show, and they started laughing. ... They told us that that week, they were cutting the ribbon on a park. From the moment the park was suggested to that moment was 18 years."

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