‘Parks and Recreation’ gets revisited on ‘Saturday Night Live’
When Aubrey Plaza entered the halls of Studio 8H in Rockefeller Plaza, it was a reunion in every sense of the world. Plaza had started out her career as an intern at the studio, working as an NBC page that helped guide tours throughout the halls of the network. Part of those tours involved giving curious onlookers a view behind the scenes of Saturday Night Live.
Plaza was coming full circle when she hosted the programme in the first week of 2023. To celebrate, Plaza decided to dust off some classic characters from the beloved sitcom that helped make her famous, Parks and Recreation.
The throwbacks were teased during Plaza’s opening monologue. Revisiting her job as a page working in the set design department, Plaza was determined to show that famous people don’t just float around Studio 8H at all times. Of course, that was immediately undermined when fellow Parks and Rec alumnus Amy Poehler, who led the series as deputy Parks Department director Leslie Knope, showed up for a cameo.
It wasn’t until Weekend Update that fans got to see Parks and Rec references really take off. As a correspondent, Plaza returned to the role of April Ludgate, the highly sarcastic and slightly deranged assistant for the Pawnee Parks Department. After getting annoyed at Colin Jost’s questions, she refers him over to Poehler, who returned to the Knope character as well.
Poehler gets some great lines in, including referencing her old post as a Weekend Update anchor by claiming to have loved the segment when it was solely hosted by Seth Myers (Poehler left SNL in 2008 and began starring in Parks and Rec less than a year later). Poehler, as Knope, even gets a headline joke in, bringing her own SNL experience full circle.
That would have been enough for fans, but Plaza got one more reference to her old sitcom during the ten-to-one sketch. Starring as the femme fatale in a particularly doomed film noir, Plaza’s mannerisms were unmistakably indebted to Janet Snakehole, the similar old-timey bombshell that Plaza’s Ludgate character would bust out on occasion in Parks and Recreation.
Even though her character goes unnamed in the sketch, it doesn’t take a major leap in logic to see where Plaza is pulling from. Sadly, the only thing we didn’t get was an appearance from Mouse Rat.
Check out Plaza’s return to the Parks and Recreation world down below.
