Last season of Parks And Recreation ended with a time jump to the year 2017, a far-off future in which our “parks” are just holograms, our “recreation” is having sex with robots, and Leslie Knope is heading the bureau charged with stopping people from having sex with robots inside our public holograms. But while executive producer Michael Schur previously offered up these sorts of new storytelling opportunities as reason for why the show would skip three years ahead for its final season—in addition to wanting to avoid rehashing the pregnancy storylines audiences had just gone through with Rashida Jones’ character—according to Rhetta, it ultimately came down to Amy Poehler.
Speaking with Vulture, Retta explained how she was unaware of the time jump until she saw the finished episode, and that Poehler later told her she was behind it. “I saw Amy Poehler at Aziz Ansari’s birthday party and she was like, ‘I’m not working with babies, so I told them we’re doing a time jump so I don’t have to work with babies,’” Retta says. “She was like, ‘I just had two kids. I’ve had my share of babies for the last three years. I’m not doing another year of babies. Especially triplets.’” Oh, would that we all had such powers to declare we’d had our share of babies, and simply skip ahead to when they’re pleasant little people who can be easily pawned off on babysitters. I would probably be a father. Alas, that technology is still at least three years off, and by then we’ll have the sexbots, so….