Parks and Recreation star Amy Poehler has joked that the beloved sitcom predicted the coronavirus pandemic.
In an interview with The Guardian, the former Saturday Night Live actor said: “There’s an episode where everybody in town gets the flu and I was thinking: ‘Oh boy, this is a little close to home.’”
The episode in question, season three’s “Flu Season”, sees some of the main characters come down with a particularly contagious strain of the flu.
Poehler also noted the prescience of another episode (”Freddie Spaghetti”), saying: “There’s a government shutdown. This woman stood up in a town hall meeting and said: ‘My children are getting out of school in two weeks. What am I supposed to do with them, keep them in my house where I live?’”
Parks and Recreation ran on NBC from 2009 to 2015, and followed the lives of a group of misfit employees at a local government department.
In the interview, Poehler also joked about what her ambitious alter-ego, Leslie Knope, would make of the current pandemic.
“Leslie would not do well with quarantine,” she said. “She’d probably go a little bananas.”
The Simpsons has been credited with predicting the virus as well, because of a nearly 20-year-old episode which saw an infectious disease travel from Asia to the US.
You can follow all the latest coronavirus news here.
