This Sunday, I will be interviewing the writing staff of Parks and Recreation live onstage at Bumbershoot. I'm very excited about this; I've been watching the whole series over again from the beginning, and I've been pleasantly surprised by how well it's aged. Once things get going in the second season, there's a complexity to the characters that rewards re-watching.

I'll have a lot of questions about comedy writing, about what it takes to make collaboration work, and how to keep the characters in character. And I'll have a few questions about Twitter, too, since most of the staff—Alan Yang, Aisha Muharrar, David King, Joe Mande, and Megan Amram—are frequent and funny Twitterers. (Matt Murray is the only person joining me onstage who does not use Twitter.)

It should be a fun talk; we've got videos to show, the writers are all really excited to be coming to town, and audience questions will make up a good portion of the program. If you're looking to learn a little more about what makes Parks and Recreation tick before the presentation, I'd encourage you to read this interview with P&R showrunner Michael Schur about why he thinks Cheers is the best sitcom of all time. You get the sense while reading the interview that Schur has made sure that Cheers's DNA runs through Parks and Recreation. It's a really illuminating look at writing comedy for television, and why most people get it so terribly wrong.