Stealing the Show Read online

  Gilmore Girls’s emphasis on female power remains consistent but complex. In the second season, Paris—after discovering that students find her ultracompetent but unlikable, à la Hillary Clinton—asks Rory to be her running mate in the high school presidential election. “People think you are nice,” Paris tells Rory, obviously disgusted. The two girls forge a winning Odd Couple alliance that continues at college, where both women work at the Yale Daily News. Unsurprisingly, Paris’s reign as editor in chief is harsh. “The work will be hard,” she declares in a speech intended to rally the troops. “It has to be hard. Nothing less than perfect will be tolerated. Please remember that I am your editor, I am not your mother.”

  That sounds a bit like a speech Sherman-Palladino herself might have delivered. The same perfectionism that made her a demanding boss also made her a prickly employee. “Once a week, I got a call saying, ‘We’re going to fire you. We are not happy with what you’re doing. You’re not taking our notes, blah blah blah,’ ” Sherman-Palladino says, pulling her knees up to her chest. “Finally, I said, ‘You can fire me or you cannot ever call me again. Those are your two choices, because it is like talking to my mother once a week. I am sorry you are tragically disappointed, but I am working twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and I literally can’t work any harder than I am.’ ”

  The WB’s platonic ideal of a show was Dawson’s Creek, and Sherman-Palladino says they didn’t understand her less-plot-driven style of storytelling: “Their stuff was very soapy; it was very angsty . . . lots of hugs and tears. They were used to shows with very short scenes. My pace freaked them out, and my style of shooting freaked them out because I don’t like close-ups, and everything they do is a close-up.” Rumors circulated that the studio was considering firing Sherman-Palladino.

  By its third season, Gilmore Girls’s ratings had improved slightly, and critics began to praise the show as a hidden gem. But Sherman-Palladino’s perfectionism was resulting in long hours and much ingenuity on the part of the crew. In 2004, she told me that she had “issues with letting go. Dan and I spend so much time making sure details are perfect.” She added that her talented crew was accustomed to rush commands: “We call at midnight saying, ‘We need a library tomorrow!’ and our set person is like, ‘Oh . . . kay.’ It’s controlled chaos, but it really works.”

  Even today Lauren Graham sounds a little weary as she admits, “It was grueling —which I hate to say, because the show itself had such a buoyant quality. But the language and the length of the scenes and the athleticism that it takes to sustain a sentence that long is unlike most television. It’s more like theater. And then, add to that filming a ten-page scene in one take, while walking and talking . . . So, yeah, those hours were insane.”

  Sherman-Palladino also had a notorious habit of distributing scripts at the last minute. “We would get scripts late, like the morning of,” says Graham. “And if you get scripts the morning of, if they have written a scene where an entire replica of the town carved in cheese is sitting on the dinner table—you can’t make that in a morning!” Several staffers pinpointed the late delivery of scripts as a wily tactic for ducking network feedback, something that dawned on Graham only retroactively: “Years later, I read an Aaron Sorkin interview where he said, ‘I turn my script in late because then, what are they going to do about it?’ ”

  A number of Gilmore staffers acknowledge that Sherman-Palladino had a reputation for being “difficult” or “volatile.” After working with her on both Gilmore and Bunheads, however, writer Sheila R. Lawrence marvels at “the things she pulls off. Not just in terms of her creative vision, but I saw her with the people on set, navigating disagreements between the [director of photography] and the set designer or whatever. She was really good at mediating and somehow making everyone feel good and heard and getting things done. People can’t keep fighting if she is making them laugh.”

  Further tensions flared over a possible spin-off featuring Rory’s roguish boyfriend Jess, played by heartthrob Milo Ventimiglia. Windward Circle, as the series was named, never made it to air, except for the pilot, which ran as a regular Gilmore Girls episode in season three. But when Sherman-Palladino had pointed to the importance of male characters in the initial publicity push for Gilmore Girls, she wasn’t being disingenuous. Female characters were the foundation of the series, in quite a revolutionary way for television, but they did not dwell in an estrogen-only universe. Luke, Jess, Dean, Richard Gilmore—all played nuanced supporting roles in the show over its seven seasons, along with Rory’s dad, Christopher; inn colleague Michel; Rory’s college beau, Logan; and even Paris’s boyfriend, Doyle (played by Danny Strong, who went on to write the movies Game Change and The Butler, as well as co-create the TV blockbuster Empire).

  In fact, when Netflix announced a reboot that would pick up in the present day, much of the Internet chatter surrounded the Gilmores’ guys. The series had ended abruptly with Luke and Lorelai in turmoil, and with Rory rejecting a proposal from Logan to focus on journalism while still harboring feelings for old loves Dean and Jess. So which guy did Rory ultimately choose? During a live cast reunion at Austin’s ATX Television Festival, actors Jared Padalecki (Dean) and Matt Czuchry (Logan) both professed to be on Team Jess. (That was the cool choice: mischievous but literary, Jess once pilfered Rory’s copy of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl from her bedroom and then returned it helpfully annotated for her.)

  Romantic plotlines propelled Gilmore Girls forward, but they were also one of the most traditional aspects of the show. The sexual tension of the “Will they or won’t they?” relationship is a TV staple, whether it’s David and Maddie in Moonlighting, Sam and Diane in Cheers, or Mulder and Scully in The X-Files. The first time we see Luke and Lorelai together, she is begging him for a fifth cup of coffee in his diner, and he is lightly negging her: “Junkie!” Later in the first season, he abruptly asks Lorelai to marry him. “What?” she says, taken aback. “Just looking for something to shut you up,” he snaps, not unkindly.

  Sherman-Palladino took great care in building Luke into a grouchy but chivalrous mensch worthy of Lorelai. He’s a flannel-shirted fantasy who can stand up to Lorelai but also give her what she needs: coffee, pie, more coffee, clever repartee, home repairs, emotional support, and space to do her own thing. Luke and Lorelai bumped up against each other for four seasons, their friendship deepening even as other, ill-advised affairs kept them apart. When Lorelai gets engaged to someone else, Luke builds her a chuppah, a Jewish wedding canopy. (None of the characters is Jewish, but Sherman-Palladino practiced a version of the old Hollywood adage “Write Yiddish, cast British.” Lorelai’s most beloved catchphrase is the Yiddish-inflected “Oy with the poodles already!”) The episode ends with the two of them standing under the chuppah in her yard—a heavy hint of things to come, though it takes several more seasons for Lorelai to realize she loves Luke. When she finally does, their awkward courting ends in a deliciously romantic moonlit scene outside Lorelai’s newly opened inn. But right in the middle of their first kiss, a bloodcurdling shriek rings out, and a stark-naked Kirk runs past the couple in the grip of one of his night terrors, stripping away any trace of sappiness from the season four finale.

  Unlike so many pop-culture stories in which the love-fixated woman chases the commitment-averse man, Lorelai is just as ambivalent as Luke. “These are two people who’ve been single for a very long time; they’ve never been married and they’re very independent,” Sherman-Palladino told me back in 2004, “so commingling isn’t necessarily going to be the easiest thing on the face of this earth.”

  After a ratings dip in season four, Sherman-Palladino says, executives threatened to cancel the show. Rory was packing up to go to Yale, pulling apart the core mother-daughter duo; the two women would have to practice their speed banter by email and telephone henceforth. Sherman-Palladino says she had always planned to take the show through Rory’s college years, to depict the young woman stumbling toward independence. The showrunner
stood her ground. “If you know where your story is going, and you know it’s right, they are paying you a lot of money to disagree with them,” she says now with a shrug. “You’ve got to be willing to be fired.”

  * * *

  By 2005, a broader audience was discovering the show’s charms, not least because of its dense web of pop-culture references. Characters rattled off obscure bands, literary references, and political trivia as if there might be a quiz at the end of each episode—details that delighted the newly blog-riddled Internet. (Blogger began just a year before Gilmore Girls premiered, and Television Without Pity, the site that pioneered TV recapping, emerged out of a Dawson’s Creek fan blog in 2002.)

  While the series was deepening its cultural credibility, Gilmore Girls’s cast and crew were growing weary by season six. The ensemble nature of the series had strengthened over the years, as Stars Hollow became a vaguely multicultural utopia with characters of various ages, races, and sizes. That had taken some of the pressure off Graham and Bledel—but not quite enough.

  “We were so tired, the three of us, we were ready to kill each other,” Sherman-Palladino says with a sigh. The actresses were unhappy enough that Amy and Dan tried to persuade the studio to pay for a second camera unit to shorten work hours; they also pushed for more personnel and a promise of two more seasons—they were working on one-year contracts—but to no avail. Tired of waiting, the showrunners packed up their offices and drove off the lot. On April 20, 2006, a press release announced that Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino had chosen to leave the show.

  “It was my intention to come back, and the deals got fucked up, and I think everyone was a little taken by surprise,” Sherman-Palladino confesses. Many crew members didn’t find out until the hiatus between the sixth and seventh seasons. “We were all devastated,” says casting director Mara Casey. “That was just a lack of respect toward Amy and Dan [by the network]. I don’t know how long that hurt her.”

  The series carried on for one more season, under the aegis of David Rosenthal and other writers the Sherman-Palladinos had trained. The trademark patter continued in season seven, Luke and Lorelai fought and made up and fought again, and Rory struggled to regain her self-confidence after a season where she’d wandered off course. Casey says, “We continued to try to build the world as it was presented to us, but it was . . . odd.” Something was clearly missing: Amy Sherman-Palladino’s voice. For viewers at home, it was like watching familiar bodies occupied by foreign spirits.

  “I was aware in our final season, as good as the writing was at times, it just wasn’t the same,” Lauren Graham suggests gently. She demanded a producer credit and began to take a more active role in the show that year, which would help her pursue writing and producing projects of her own down the line. Graham says it was ultimately a combination of “fatigue and the feeling that this wasn’t the material we started with” that led her and Bledel to turn down sizable raises to stay on for an eighth season.

  “You have to be young and a little bit naïve to have such artistic integrity,” she continues. “People were mad [at us], other cast members . . . but I didn’t know until later. As you get older in this career, you realize it’s not going to kill you probably to stay on the show one more year. But at the time, I just thought that to stay could actually diminish the memory of the show and harm it. I really cared about that.”

  The Gilmore Girls finale aired on May 15, 2007, with the town throwing Rory a farewell party as she graduates from Yale and prepares to go on the road to cover Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign for an online magazine. With rain threatening to ruin the event, Luke stays up all night sewing together all the neighbors’ tarps to make a giant tent, and Kirk presents Rory with a sash made out of his mother’s nightgown. The episode put the “sweet” in bittersweet but left many plot elements hanging.

  Sherman-Palladino had long dreamed of how she’d end the show, down to the last four words her characters would utter, and could not bear to watch someone else’s conclusion. She fantasized about having another shot at wrapping Gilmore, but she knew it was a ridiculous dream and moved on to creating a new show for Fox, The Return of Jezebel James.

  A traditional multicamera sitcom, it starred indie-cool actresses Parker Posey and Lauren Ambrose as estranged sisters who reunite when one asks the other to carry her baby. Before the show had even aired, Posey was complaining to the New York Times about the grind: “I’m like a wet rag that’s been totally wrung out, stretched, ironed, creased and crumpled and hung out to dry.” The show was canceled after just three episodes. Sherman-Palladino returned to the small screen in 2012 with Bunheads, an effervescent dramedy about a Vegas showgirl who winds up in a small town teaching little girls ballet. It starred Broadway actress Sutton Foster as Michelle, an amalgam of Lorelai and Miss Patty, with Kelly Bishop as her WASP-ish mother-in-law and banter companion. Despite adoration from fans and critics alike, ABC Family pulled the plug on Bunheads after only eighteen episodes.

  Meanwhile, the legend of Gilmore Girls extended its reach. ABC Family aired reruns of the series for nearly a decade, snagging new fans who would savor details on fan forums, Tumblr, and podcasts. Sites popped up dedicated to Rory’s book choices and the music played on the show. There was even a message-board thread devoted to Gilmore Girls food references.

  The year 2014 was the big bang for Gilmore Girls fandom: that’s when Netflix began streaming all seven seasons, introducing Stars Hollow to a new generation of viewers who had been too young to watch the first time around, as well as to those who had previously snubbed it. While the show might have seemed like a nerdy feminist pleasure in 2000, by 2014, nerdiness and feminism had pop culture cachet. Nerd king Stephen Colbert even tweeted the news in September 2014: “Obama brought back the Iraq War AND Gilmore Girls is coming to Netflix!?! It’s a #ThrowBackThursday miracle!”

  The show proved to be immensely binge-able. Stars Hollow had always been an escapist fantasy of a gentler, smarter, leftier America, but now it had period charm, too. The clock was stopped at a moment just before smartphones and nonstop connectivity. And its dense but meandering style differentiated it from contemporary plot twist–dependent TV.

  “Gilmore Girls breaks a lot of the rules of drama, but it worked because it felt like real life,” Gilmore writer Jane Espenson suggests. “Real life isn’t structured like drama. It really woke me up to how many rules you can break and still be entertaining.”

  * * *

  Fast-forward to 2016, and all those years of Internet rumors and fan fantasies and behind-the-scenes negotiations have resulted in a miracle: Gilmore Girls returns from the dead. Shot as four ninety-minute episodes to stream on Netflix, Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life falls somewhere between a TV show, a miniseries, and a movie, and was written and directed entirely by Amy Sherman-Palladino and Dan Palladino, with all the major cast members returning (except Edward Herrmann, who died in 2014).

  Lauren Graham’s career prospered in the post-Gilmore years; she starred in the NBC series Parenthood, wrote a novel, and developed her own TV projects. Eager as she was to revisit Stars Hollow, she found returning to the nest disorienting—literally. “They had re-created the sets, but apparently no one had exact measurements of what they were, because why would they? Who ever thought we would come back?” she burbles rapidly, à la Lorelai. “So, when they remade it, everything was the same but slightly different, which added to the surreal quality.”

  Instead of feeling daunted by the long swathes of walky-talky dialogue requiring word-perfect delivery, Graham now craved them. “Before, I sometimes felt the structure was really holding me back, but this time, I was just so invigorated by it.” She says that Sherman-Palladino used to joke about giving Lorelai the longest monologue in television history. In the final episode of A Year in the Life, Graham says proudly, she has a speech “as long as I have ever spoken on TV.”

  It comes after Lorelai has left Stars Hollow to go on a wilderness trek inspired b
y Cheryl Strayed’s book Wild, hoping to untangle feelings about Luke and grief over the death of her emotionally withholding father. She calls her mother to relate a happy memory of Richard Gilmore from her childhood. Lorelai recalls playing hooky after a boy broke her heart; her dad caught her sitting alone in the mall, crying. “I waited for him to yell at me, to punish me, to ground me forever. To tell me how disappointed he was in me, and nothing came. And finally, I got up enough courage to look up at him, and he was standing there with a pretzel. A giant pretzel covered in mustard.” That scene reminds its audience how masterfully Gilmore Girls evokes ingrown family traumas—and of course, how integral food is to their relationships.

  A Year in the Life packs a full season’s worth of Gilmore-ishness into that quartet of episodes. Sherman-Palladino indulges her love of musicals with a show-within-the-show (featuring Bunheads star Sutton Foster) and the dance-club scene whose rehearsal I witnessed. There’s Kirk screening his independent film and walking his pet pig; Lane’s band, Hep Alien, playing a quick set; and a stream of references and cameos that only a pop culture obsessive could digest. Finally, at the end of the reboot, are Sherman-Palladino’s long-awaited four final words, which bring the series back to its beginnings in an elegant narrative loop that nevertheless leaves us in a bleaker place.