Michael Schur explains the "bananas" logistics of A Parks and Recreation Special

Entertainment Weekly

Originally, Amy Poehler and Nick Offerman were filmed introducing last night's special as themselves, but Schur thought it would be odd to see them go from themselves to Leslie Knope and Ron Swanson. So Paul Rudd was contacted at the last minute. "We texted him," Schur tells EW, "and said like, 'Hey, would you be up for this?' And he said, 'Sure!' But he's on the East Coast, he's not here. So we were like, 'Okay, we only have a day to do this, so we can FedEx you this rig and then you would get it tomorrow.' And he's like, 'I have an iPhone! I have a little microphone. Let me just do it and see if it's okay.' I wrote a script for him, I emailed it to him, and then an hour later, he was like, “Here!” He had just done it. And it was incredible. So, the logistics were bananas, but also this group of people is so chill and so game for anything and so happy to do stuff like this that it ended up being about as smooth as it could possibly have been." Schur also revealed that director and executive producer Morgan Sackett devised a way to film the episode with iPhones, a little tripod and little lighting rigs that would make the characters not look terrible. "And he just arranged to get those rigs into the hands of all of the actors after having been properly wiped down and de-virusified for safety," says Schur. "Morgan and a couple other people who used to work on the show just drove all over the city of Los Angeles, delivering these things. Aziz is in England, so we FedExed him one." Schur wrote the episode with six key Parks and Rec writers: Megan Amram, Joe Mande, Jen Statsky, Aisha Muharrar, Matt Murray and Dave King. "We didn't have a lot of time at all to do it," he says. "We conceived of and wrote the script very quickly as a group over about three-and-a-half days. If I had been doing it alone, I would've had a panic attack. But knowing I had six excellent writers who were very familiar with the show working on it with me, that helped me relax a lot."

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• Watch the full 25-minute A Parks and Recreation Special on YouTube