'Parks and Recreation' is still evolving

PASADENA, Calif. — The "Parks and Recreation" we're seeing this season isn't exactly the show we saw last spring. Because things didn't work out quite as planned during that six-episode first season.

Ask Amy Poehler how her character, Leslie Knope, has evolved, and she has a quick answer.

"Well, like a fine wine," she joked.

"You say that for everything, though, to be fair," interjected executive producer Michael Schur.

But both the producers and Poehler admit that the character around whom "Parks and Recreation" revolves has indeed evolved. Sort of.

Leslie is a mid-level bureaucrat in a small Indiana city. She's got big dreams and a lot of self-confidence, but she doesn't have a whole lot of ability or a record of success.

"I think that inherently and fundamentally, everything that we thought Leslie believed in and who she was stayed the same," Poehler said. "I think there were just some small changes or maybe just revelations in where she would go, what she would do, some of her boundaries and stuff."

"To me it's more nope, less dope," executive producer Greg Daniels added.

Certainly Leslie has seemed like less of a dope in Season 2 of "Parks and Recreation" (Thursdays, 7 p.m., NBC/Ch. 5).

"We started off thinking that the comedy was going to come from (the fact) that she was going to be responsible for all the predicaments that she got into," Daniels said. "And then later, we realized that it's just as funny and the world is just as irritating for her to be unfairly put into predicaments."

Like this week's episode, when Leslie is hoping to get a woman-of-the-year award from the Indiana Organization of Women — and then her boss, Ron Swanson (Nick Offerman) gets it instead. And he gets it for a program that's Leslie's baby.

"One of the keys to her personality, we always thought, was optimism," Schur said. "And it turns out that it's hard sometimes to tell the difference as a viewer between optimism and cluelessness. And a lot of people responded to us that they thought she was kind of clueless or ditzy or something, which was never part of the conception.

"And, obviously, we were just presenting it, I think, a little bit incorrectly somehow."