While hosting a set visit to the “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” set Wednesday for reporters as part of the TV Critics Association summer press tour, show co-creator Mike Schur took time to answer a lingering question about his other network sitcom, “Parks and Recreation.”
On the sixth season finale in April, the show suddenly jumped three years into the future. Leslie, who started the episode pregnant, ended it with two year old triplets, firmly ensconced into her new job for the National Parks Service, conveniently located at the same Pawnee Town Hall as her other job.
Look for Pawnee in 2017 throughout the concluding season, Schur says.
“All I will say, because we’re being very tight-lipped about the show in the final season,” he said, “but the entire season will be in the future.”
“We’re not pulling our punch,” he said. “We’re not going to back up and tell the story in 2014 and pick up to it. They’re in the future for the whole year, that’s the plan.”
Schur said they came up with the idea of jumping time a couple of years “somewhere in the middle of the year” of the last season. “Once we decided that Leslie was going to take this job, we were like we’ve seen her start a new job a couple of times now, the only way we do this is to find an interesting way to skip that. Then we thought: She should get pregnant too – it’s like, double bonus: No pregnancy stories, no changing diapers stories. Skip through, fast forward, Tivo forward through all that stuff. to the more interesting next thing in her life.”
Besides, he added, “Babies are notoriously terrible actors. They won’t listen to direction, they can’t hold their necks up, they’re always crying. They’re always: ‘I’ll be in my trailer!’”