West Hartford Small Town Government: Inspiration Or Not?

Published April 6, 2009 at 12:34 p.m.

The Courant's Roger Catlin wrote an article about West Hartford's Michael Schur who co-wrote and co-produces the new NBC comedy entitled Parks and Recreation, which is supposedly a parody of Small-Town Government and possibly modeled after our own West Hartford.

Why not? there's enough comedy in our Town Hall, and the projects they embark upon, to last a writer's lifetime. I mean, have you been to a town meeting lately? Some times the Town Council and Board of Education meetings become "Must see TV". We also have an interesting cast of characters.

The Courant reports:

"The front row is mostly old people and weirdos," the script for its pilot says of a public hearing. "The old people stare impassively like cows."

One of the speakers at the hearing is described as "a 50-ish weirdo...very animated and inexplicably super sarcastic" who says things like: "The head of the police is a ninth-degree Mason," and "One day there was a fire. That's what killed my snake."

Truth be told, you can probably find that in most town's public hearings across the country...West Hartford actually has no age limit on weirdos. We've seen them younger than 50.

Michael Schur grew up in West Hartford, graduated from Hall High School and began his TV comedy career doing short shows at West Hartford Community TV, which is headquartered at West Hartford Town Hall.
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The setting is a fictional Indiana town called Pawnee City. But a cursory viewing of the well-meaning but occasionally unintentionally amusing fare on West Hartford Community TV indicates at least an inspiration there.

Have you seen some of the shows on WHC-TV? Some are very strange - and others are really pretty entertaining and informational...All in all they do a really great job over there, and it's good to see they may have helped launch Schur's career.

"I don't think that the show is about politics as much as it is about government," Schur said at the session. "It's like we're not grinding any kind of ax or anything. It's really about a small project on a very local level.

Well, small town projects can be pretty amusing. We've seen our share of drama, conflict, emotion and humor come out of everything from building a new school to constructing Blue Back Square...Remember when Councilman Art Spada said no one would be dishonest enough to park in the town garages and then run into the library to check out a book just to park for free? Now that was humor at it's best...Or how about the time when Richard Heapes said there was going to be an Arts Cinema (with no alcohol served) at Blue Back Square and we ended up with an overpriced run of the mill movie theater which is seeking a liquor permit...Heapes is probably still laughing over that one...Then of course there was Councilman Joe Visconti riding through West Hartford Center on a horse.

"We're not doing it as a big satire of past events," he went on. "It's more just trying to look at how a single government works or public-works project happens at one town in America."
Televised city council hearings are part of the inspiration, said Greg Daniels.
"It's that kind of world, and you know how dry those can be," Daniels said. "We intend to populate it with fun personalities and the inevitable conflicts that occur in any kind of decision-making at a local level."
But when I finally tracked Schur down, he assured me that no, "Parks and Recreation" is not actually about his home town.
In fact, he said with a laugh about his West Hartford days, "I never paid any attention to local government growing up. You know it exists, but nobody thinks about it."
Pawnee City, Ind., is meant to be any town, though some towns in Indiana are claiming they were the inspiration because they were visited by producers for research. But Schur said he and Daniels did their initial research by attending town-council meetings in Claremont and other California towns.

Well, even if it isn't really meant to be West Hartford, we'll just have to watch the show and see if we can identify parallel local personalities with Pawnee City counterparts. There are bound to be some...Afterall, the show features characters such as:
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Tom Haverford (Aziz Ansari, "Human Giant," "Scrubs"), who cheerfully exploits his government position for personal gain [and] Ron Swanson, who is philosophically opposed to government in any form.

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[Then there is the] charismatic city planner Mark Brendanawicz, whose outlook has been soured by 15 years of public service.

Do you know any people like that?

NBC also says this of the show:

The documentary cameras follow Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler, NBC's "Saturday Night Live," "Baby Mama") a mid-level bureaucrat in the Parks and Recreation Department of Pawnee, Indiana. In an attempt to beautify her town -- and advance her career -- Leslie takes on what should be a fairly simple project: help local nurse Ann Perkins (Rashida Jones, NBC's "The Office," "Unhitched") turn an abandoned construction pit into a community park. Opposing them are defensive bureaucrats, selfish neighbors, real estate developers, and single-issue fanatics -- whose weapons are lawsuits, the jumble of city codes, and the very democratic process that Leslie loves so much.

Gosh if that doesn't sound like a scaled down version of the Blue Back Square project, then honestly what is?

The show could prove to be quite a hoot for us all in West Hartford, but be careful, you might also find yourself as one of the players in the cast.

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