For Amy, it’s a walk in the park

Whenever the writers of “Saturday Night Live” wanted to take a jab at Sen. Hillary Clinton, it was Amy Poehler who got the call.

Poehler returns to political humor – in a much more neighborhood way – tonight for her new NBC series “Parks and Recreation” (8:30 p.m., KHQ-6 in Spokane).

The ad-libbed series from Greg Daniels and Mike Schur, executive producers of “The Office,” has Poehler playing Leslie Knope, a deputy chairwoman of the Department of Parks and Recreation Department in Pawnee, Ind.

It’s a low-level job for Knope, but that doesn’t stop her from having big-time dreams. In a weird bit of fiction imitating art imitating life, Poehler’s character holds up Clinton as one of her many role models.

“I think that Leslie looks to a lot of women in politics for inspiration, and there’s so many now,” Poehler says.

Poehler took the following she built through “SNL,” gave it a big kick with her starring role in “Baby Mama,” and has reached the level where a show can be sold on her name alone.

“The opportunity to be able to work with Mike and Greg and Rashida (Jones) and Aziz (Ansari), and everyone who is involved in the show was absolutely the reason why I wanted to do it,” Poehler says.

“I was excited about the idea of being able to turn the volume down a little bit and sit with a character for a while. ‘SNL’ is an amazing place to work, but the ideas and scenes and characters were very transient.”

Poehler’s confidence in Daniels and Schur stems from their casting of Steve Carell as the lead in “The Office” just as his star was beginning to rise. Carell and cast have improvised their way through five seasons to become one of the biggest comedy hits on NBC.

As with “The Office,” Poehler’s series is designed to look like footage for a documentary. That can be a problem, because Knope seems to speak without thinking.

“Leslie is an optimist, and she’s really ambitious, and she’s really kind of hoping that the place she is now is not the place she’s going to stay,” Poehler says.

“So she’s kind of struggling to find her way in a, quote, unquote, ‘man’s world’ to try to make her mark, and along the way, she’s deluded.”

Poehler isn’t the first “SNL” graduate to make the move to films and prime-time TV. The most obvious recent example is Tina Fey, her “Baby Mama” co-star and the force behind the NBC comedy “30 Rock.”

So has Poehler been waking up every morning thinking this would be the day she would show Fey she was just as good?

“That’s right,” she says. Then the comedian comes out in her, and she adds: “Then I turn around and I wake her up and we have breakfast together. That’s how that goes.”

It seems it isn’t only politics that make for strange bedfellows.

The birthday bunch

Playboy founder Hugh Hefner is 83. Naturalist Jim Fowler (“Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom”) is 77. Actress Michael Learned (“The Waltons”) is 70. Country singer Hal Ketchum is 56. Actor Dennis Quaid is 55. Actress-model Paulina Porizkova is 44. Actress Cynthia Nixon (“Sex and the City”) is 43. Actress Keshia Knight Pulliam (“The Cosby Show”) is 30. Singer-actor Jesse McCartney is 22.