Here’s Why Adam Scott Won’t Rewatch ‘Parks and Recreation’
There’s a good reason why Adam Scott won’t rewatch episodes of Parks and Recreation — and it’s not because he’s so busy with his duties down in Macrodata Refinement.
“There’s something that I miss so much, which is why I never watch Parks,” Scott told Rob Lowe on a recent Literally podcast. “It’s because it just makes me sad. It makes me miss everybody. I don’t feel like I ever took it for granted because I was always appreciative of how lucky we were. It was just such a great place to go every day.”
Lowe noted that not every job builds long-lasting friendships like those they found on Parks and Rec. “Look, it’s a little mercenary sometimes,” he said about the TV business. “Parks is you and Pratt and Amy and everybody, Aziz and Aubrey. We’re all in our thread. We’re all there for each other.”
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Jeez, guys, enough with the sap. It’s more fun when Scott and Lowe talk about being totally clueless when they started on the sitcom. The two actors weren’t part of the original cast, only jumping in at the end of the second season. Scott noted that the show didn’t know what it was doing either. “They really started finding it on the road,” he said. “They were kind of figuring it out as they went.”
“I had never seen the show before we came on it,” Lowe confessed. “It’s so different. It’s like an indie movie.”
Lowe and Scott didn’t get much direction before they dove into the deep end of the Parks pool. “I remember waiting for our cue to walk into that very first scene,” said Lowe. “We’re standing behind the door. Just met. And in we go. And it’s Ben Wyatt and Chris Traeger. We didn’t know what the fuck we were doing.”
“I remember after the first take, (Parks director) Dean Holland coming up and being like, so it is like a mock documentary, that’s what we’re doing, but you don’t need to keep looking at the camera. You don’t need to notice it at all,” said Scott. “We’ll do talking-head interviews later. I guess I was acting like, why is this cameraman here? I didn’t know what to do.”
But that sideways glance became a Scott trademark on the show, a button on top of a punchline. “You were a master of the look to camera,” gushed Lowe, sounding eerily like his Chris Traeger character.
While Lowe embodied Traeger from that first scene, Scott found his character through trial and error. Ben Wyatt, in that introductory scene and early episodes, barely resembles the man Leslie Knope came to love.
“You were a huge dick,” said Lowe.
Scott agreed. “I was a total dick.”
It’s been a minute since the networks developed a generational sitcom. Scott suspects it’s because shows like Parks and Rec need time to figure out who they are. “They just don’t make ‘em like that (anymore),” he sighed. “They don’t let the show breathe and find itself.”
