Joe Biden To Appear On Parks and Recreation

CNN:

Next week's episode of Parks and Recreation is going to have a VIP: the VP.

Joe Biden — yes, the very guy who was re-elected Vice President of the United States — will guest-star in the Nov. 15 installment of Parks and Recreation, EW has learned. His cameo occurs at the beginning of the episode, in which former Congressional campaign manager Ben Wyatt (Adam Scott) takes fiancée/City Councilwoman Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler), to the White House to meet America's No. 2, who has long been her No. 1 crush. (As Leslie once noted, her ideal man has "the brains of George Clooney and the body of Joe Biden.")

Parks scored camera time with Biden in July when the show traveled to Washington, D.C. to film its season 5 premiere, which featured appearances by Senators Barbara Boxer, Olympia Snowe, and John McCain. How big of a casting coup was Biden for NBC's small-town government comedy? "Given that Eleanor Roosevelt and Bella Abzug are no longer with us, this is probably no. 1," quips executive producer Michael Schur. "[Leslie] has a lot of female heroes that cross party lines. She has a lot of social figures that she considers heroes, but the funniest hero is Joe Biden. There's an episode last season where she says, 'Joe Biden is on my celebrity sex list — well, he is my celebrity sex list'... It was amazing to have her meet Olympia Snowe and Barbara Boxer because that meant something to her politically. But this transcends that. She's meeting the man that she's in love with on some deep level. It was a bigger deal to us in some ways that she meet Joe Biden than it was that she meet Barack Obama." (Obama, by the way, has revealed that he watches Parks with his family, by the way. "It's a very amazing and weird thing to find out that the President watches your show," marvels Schur.)

Once the producers committed to shooting an episode in D.C., the process of landing Biden was "so much less difficult than we ever possibly imagined," says Schur, noting: "His staff really loves the show, and he apparently had watched the show with his family and his family liked it... The hardest part was keeping it secret for so long because there's all these FEC rules and equal-time rules. We couldn't air it before the election because it was the equivalent of a campaign contribution to advertise for one candidate."

Why does it not surprise me that it was so much less difficult than they imagined to get Joe Biden to make an appearance on the show?  That guy is awesome.