Stealing the Show Read online

  During a break in the action, Bledel and Hewes both bustle into Video Village. They plant themselves in front of Sherman-Palladino, beseeching her attention. For a moment, sitting there in her purple fedora, the showrunner looks just like Lorelai Gilmore, juggling the needs of her real-life mother and fantasy daughter, orchestrating the intricate machinery of a television production—all while talking incredibly fast.

  * * *

  When Gilmore Girls first premiered on October 5, 2000, nothing about the series suggested it would turn out to be one of the decade’s most beloved TV portraits of female relationships, or that it would become such a cult hit that it would eventually merit a revival.

  Originally airing on the WB, a fledgling network then known mostly as a ghetto for teen soaps such as Dawson’s Creek and Seventh Heaven, Sherman-Palladino’s series was saddled with a name that hinted at a homespun family drama or a sappy chick show. Gilmore Girls might as well have marched into the world with a sign around its neck reading DON’T TAKE ME SERIOUSLY. In its seven seasons, it won only a single Emmy Award, for Outstanding Makeup, despite having some of the best writing and acting of its time.

  Just a year before Gilmore Girls premiered, HBO had catapulted The Sopranos into the pop-culture firmament. Along with The Wire, The Sopranos set a template for quality TV that equated depth and substance with troubled male characters, roiling masculine energy, internecine power struggles, and regular eruptions of highly realistic violence: think The Shield, Dexter, Sons of Anarchy, Rescue Me, Breaking Bad. It’s no coincidence that this sort of show was invariably run by a male auteur, for whom the turbulent antihero on-screen often seemed to function as a mirror-image surrogate. Women remained secondary figures in these male psychodramas, and female television showrunners longing to create dramas with a less macho tone found themselves stymied.

  Almost by definition, then, “serious” television offered minimal scope for women either behind the camera or in front of it. Gilmore Girls’s immersion in the emotionally tangled lives of intelligent women meant it had virtually no chance of being seen as an important show. Where were the murderous rage, the brooding moral quandaries to be found in Stars Hollow? Instead, there were small daily compromises, romances, and pleasures. Tony Soprano strangles a man during his daughter Meadow’s college tour; Lorelai merely ponders her own thwarted college dreams and knack for self-sabotage during the Gilmores’ similar visit to Harvard. Gilmore Girls’s blend of quiet emotional drama and chatty screwball comedy stranded it in the category known as “dramedy,” a slight (in both senses) term often applied to women-centric series that more or less defined them as lightweight. The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd and Sex and the City were early recipients of the label, later followed by Weeds, Nurse Jackie, and Girls.

  If Sherman-Palladino believed it was possible to create a sharp-edged female-focused series with wide appeal, that’s because she began her TV career on just such a show. Writing for Roseanne in her early twenties, Sherman-Palladino earned the sitcom its only script Emmy nomination when she wrote (along with partner Jennifer Heath) the episode about Becky and birth control. “Starting on Roseanne was the best and worst thing that could’ve happened,” she says now, both because the writing standards were so high and because Barr, at great emotional cost, carved out a kind of network freedom that Sherman-Palladino would struggle to replicate through the rest of her career.

  The first time I interviewed Sherman-Palladino—for a 2004 feature in the Village Voice, where I was the TV critic—she joked that in Stars Hollow, Al Gore was president. An idealized liberal bubble, this small New England town was the kind of place Hillary Clinton probably had in mind when she said, “It takes a village”: quaint yet progressive, cozy but not narrow-minded, accepting of strangers and its own native eccentrics. Above all, it was a place run largely by women, where female autonomy and ability were taken for granted. The town was full of female business owners and bosses (including Lorelai, who ran a local inn in tandem with her obsessive-compulsive perfectionist chef, Sookie). And daughter Rory’s role models were icons of female achievement and authority, such as Christiane Amanpour, Gloria Steinem, and Madeleine Albright.

  Meanwhile, out in the real world, the one where George W. Bush ended up in the White House instead of Gore, America was increasingly dividing into Red states and Blue states. The Republicans pushed policies that, in an echo of the Reagan-Bush backdrop to Roseanne and Murphy Brown, slashed family planning funding in favor of antiabortion and abstinence-only programs. Offering a consoling vision of a kinder and more tolerant America, Gilmore Girls was one of the things that helped me get through the Dark Ages of the 2000s. How eerie that the show should return on the eve of an even bleaker period of backlash, with the sequel airing only a few weeks after the November 2016 election. Perhaps in the imaginary idyll that is Stars Hollow, Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump?

  * * *

  On a chilly November morning in 2015, I meet Sherman-Palladino at a tiny Brooklyn café just around the corner from the apartment she shares with her husband. She is taking a break from the couple’s self-imposed exile as they scramble to draft a script for the Netflix reboot. Using her elbow to nudge aside a stroller blocking her path to the table as if it carries an infectious disease, she yanks off her leopard-print cap and lets a cascade of black curly hair unfurl before tucking it away again. Her phone periodically pings with texts from Dan, who is at home reanimating Stars Hollow.

  Sherman-Palladino grew up steeped in old-fashioned show biz in Los Angeles’s suburban San Fernando Valley. Her mom was a dancer in Broadway musicals; her dad, Don Sherman, a Catskills comedian turned TV writer/actor, appeared on series such as The Monkees, Maude, and Barney Miller throughout Amy’s childhood. Although she wasn’t raised religiously, she marinated in Jewish comedy; Jackie Mason and Shecky Greene were regular visitors to the Sherman house. Discovering her father’s beat-up copy of the record 2000 Years with Carl Reiner & Mel Brooks was a life-changing experience, introducing young Amy to Brooks’s Two-Thousand-Year-Old Man character. A comic voice that was “fast and furious and human and exhausted and hilarious,” Brooks made her want to be part of the Jewish cultural continuum. As she once recalled, “I instantly adopted a New York accent. I became Van Nuys via Brooklyn (well, Brooklyn in the forties).”

  After training as a dancer, Sherman-Palladino took some classes with LA improv troupe the Groundlings in her early twenties. There she befriended Jennifer Heath, who suggested they try writing spec scripts (“spec” being code for the sample episodes of existing TV shows you’d have to write to apply for a staff job). Sherman-Palladino signed up for a sitcom-writing course at UCLA, which led to a gig for the duo on City, a star vehicle for Rhoda actress Valerie Harper. Although City didn’t last long, it got the two women job offers on Roseanne. In those days, Sherman-Palladino was still keeping her options open for a dancing career and says she simultaneously got a callback for a role in the touring company of Cats. After some deliberation, she chose Roseanne over Rumpleteazer.

  Roseanne Barr says she had immediate affection for Sherman-Palladino because of her penchant for funny hats and her perfectionism: “She is one of the people who can keep coming back with funny, and funnier. You’d better make me laugh louder or you’re getting fired. Some didn’t do it. But she did.”

  It had taken just six months between Sherman-Palladino’s first spec script and this job on a hit show. Nothing would ever unfold for her with such fairy-tale ease again. After Roseanne, she formed the production company Dorothy Parker Drank Here, in tribute to the legendary Algonquin Round Table wit. Over the next several years, she developed some sitcoms that never made it to the air and one that did, briefly: Love and Marriage focused on the Nardinis, a blue-collar Italian American couple struggling to raise their rebellious kids in New York City. Fox fired entertainment chief John Matoian the month Love and Marriage premiered; his replacement, Peter Roth, promptly canceled it. A stint followed on Veronica’s Closet, a late ‘
90s sitcom starring Kirstie Alley as a fashion executive, produced by Friends creators Marta Kauffman and David Crane. Sherman-Palladino doesn’t mince words about her time on the show, describing it as a “terrible experience.” Crane, she says, “is a lovely and very talented man, and it was nice watching him do his thing. But other than that . . .” She raises one eyebrow meaningfully. The writers’ room was “toxic with people who all wanted to be on Friends and would sit in that room and make one fat joke after another about Kirstie.”

  On Veronica’s Closet, Sherman-Palladino says she hit rock bottom. She told her husband, Dan, “ ‘I think I am done with sitcoms, I don’t think it’s the right place for me anymore.’ And he said, ‘Just figure out what you really want to do.’ ”

  * * *

  In the fall of 1999, Sherman-Palladino pitched ideas to several networks. One of them was the WB. A young channel with a tight budget and short track record, it nonetheless had begun to build an audience on two niches underserved by more established networks: African American comedy (The Jamie Foxx Show; Sister, Sister) and teen drama (Dawson’s Creek; Buffy the Vampire Slayer). Already it had created platforms for the Wayans brothers, Kevin Williamson, and ex-Roseanne writer Joss Whedon.

  Late in her meeting with the WB, Sherman-Palladino mentioned offhandedly that she’d been toying with a show about a young mom and daughter who are best friends. WB executive Susanne Daniels, already a fan of Sherman-Palladino’s writing, was taken with the notion of a brainy teen girl character who wasn’t overtly sexy or fixated on boys. She suggested developing it as an hour-long drama. Sherman-Palladino agreed to flesh out the idea but was a little unnerved; not only had she agreed to work on a story that she had barely considered but she was also a half-hour comedy pro with no experience writing hour-long dramas.

  A brief trip with Dan to the quaint town of Washington, Connecticut, charmed her: Sherman-Palladino marveled over the pumpkin patch and a diner where patrons served themselves coffee. Stars Hollow quickly populated itself inside her brain, and her show’s heroines began to take form: thirty-two-year-old single mother Lorelai Gilmore and her teenage daughter, Rory. Sherman-Palladino fashioned Lorelai as the rebellious only child of a patrician Hartford couple, Emily and Richard Gilmore. She had gotten pregnant at sixteen and run away, choosing to raise her kid in a humbler small-town atmosphere, while also working her way up to become the successful manager of a local inn not unlike the one in which Amy and Dan were staying.

  Despite her wealthy upbringing, Lorelai’s character owed a great deal to Roseanne Conner. “A lot of Roseanne’s point of view went into her,” says Sherman-Palladino. “Lorelai had a lot more options than Roseanne Conner, but there was an independence and a ‘I’m going to figure this out on my own terms’ attitude which came directly from Roseanne.”

  In fact, Roseanne colored Sherman-Palladino’s whole approach to Gilmore Girls. “I don’t know if I thought about it at the time, but the training of my first show was solely about this woman’s point of view,” she says. “Nothing happened in Roseanne that didn’t come back to affect her. So if the daughters had a story, it was always about: how will this come back to affect Roseanne? Her point of view permeates everything. She is the alpha in the room, and Lorelai is always the alpha.”

  Daniels loved the pilot script, which concisely evoked the relationship between mother and daughter against the whimsical backdrop of Stars Hollow. In a meeting at the WB to sketch out plotlines after the network had picked up the show, Sherman-Palladino mentioned an idea for a fight between Lorelai and her socialite mother, Emily, from whom she is estranged. Unable to afford private school for the brilliant Rory, Lorelai accepts tuition money from her parents; in return, her mother exacts a promise that Lorelai and Rory spend every Friday night dining at the family manor. Daniels suggested they instead include this scene in the pilot, perfectly setting up for viewers a central theme of the show: the tangled bonds among these three generations of female Gilmores and the complex matrix of love, money, and familial duty.

  Emily Gilmore’s sense of self rests on wealth and status, and she delights in lording it over anyone who doesn’t live up to her standards, be it her maid (who gets replaced every episode for not satisfying Emily, an echo of Murphy Brown’s high turnover of secretaries) or her daughter. Much as Lorelai resents Emily, she has inherited her knack for verbal manipulation. Their relationship is a never-ending battle for the last word. That first family dinner introduces us to Gilmore Girls’s trademark mixture of emotional jousting and physical comedy, as the grandparents coo over Rory while belittling Lorelai’s career success. This boils over into a confrontation between Lorelai and Emily about the original sin of Gilmore Girls: Lorelai’s decision to raise her daughter alone.

  “You took that girl and completely shut us out of your life,” Emily huffs, to which Lorelai replies, “You wanted to control me.” She notes that she grew up quickly. “I had to figure out how to live. I found a good job,” says Lorelai, pride mingled with petulance. “As a maid,” Emily jeers. “With all your brains and talent . . .”

  After dinner, the camera follows Lorelai and Rory outside the house. “Do I look shorter? I feel shorter,” Lorelai deadpans to her daughter. In a later episode, she will note that the day she shattered her parents dreams by telling them she was pregnant “was the only time they ever looked small to me.” Lorelai takes empowerment where she can get it.

  * * *

  Finding the right actresses to play the Gilmore women would be key. Alexis Bledel was a New York University student and model with no acting experience; she was struggling with a cold the day she went in to audition, the result of a winter modeling gig in which water was thrown over her shivering body. Bledel’s sickly state gave her audition the dose of sleepyheaded realism Sherman-Palladino was looking for in Rory. “We weren’t sure she was the right one for the role, but there was just something about her. Those eyes alone!” Sherman-Palladino gasps. “The way she photographed—you hear people saying ‘the camera loved her,’ but the camera loved Alexis in a bizarro way.”

  Veteran actress Kelly Bishop struck Sherman-Palladino as the one to play grande dame Emily Gilmore. She had won a Tony Award for her portrayal of the sexy, sarcastic dancer Sheila (partly based on her own life) in A Chorus Line, and had appeared in movies such as An Unmarried Woman and Dirty Dancing. Bishop brought a steely gravitas to the show, especially in combination with the dignified bearing of Edward Herrmann, cast as the bluff but kindly Richard Gilmore. Best known for his turns as President Franklin D. Roosevelt in various made-for-TV movies, Herrmann fell in love with the script—“Here was a girl in public high school who was bored silly with boys and makeup, and wanted to read Les Misérables. That, I thought, was charming”—and offered to audition.

  Casting Lorelai proved more difficult. A stream of contenders was brought through the WB offices and rejected. “We didn’t find Lauren until the last fucking minute,” Sherman-Palladino says dramatically. Lauren Graham had costarred in a string of unsuccessful sitcoms and was at that moment tied to M.Y.O.B., a struggling comedy that NBC hadn’t yet decided whether to cancel. So Sherman-Palladino met the actress knowing she might not be able to have her.

  Graham recalls running through the lines with Sherman-Palladino before the audition and being startled by the showrunner’s exactitude. “She said, ‘Okay, but can you do this exactly as written?’ ” On other comedies, the young actress had been encouraged to improvise. But Graham quickly grasped that Sherman-Palladino’s language “needs to be done exactly as written because it’s so musical.”

  They decided to shoot the pilot in Toronto, with Graham in the lead—a decision that Daniels calls “hold-my-breath terrifying.” If Graham’s other series got renewed, Gilmore Girls would have to find money to reshoot with another actress. And money was no trivial matter—as it was, the WB had funded the initial scripts for Gilmore Girls in an unusual way: by partnering with the Family Friendly Programming Forum, a consortium of ma
jor advertisers hoping to promote wholesome TV. Fortunately, Graham’s other series was axed, and the WB picked up Gilmore Girls in the spring of 2000. Sherman-Palladino persuaded the network to relocate the set to Warner Bros.’ lot in LA, conjuring the faux New England town on the same fictional streets once used for The Music Man and The Waltons. She also had to replace the two actors who played the key parts of Sookie (Lorelai’s best friend as well as the inn’s chef) and Dean (who would become Rory’s first love).

  Sherman-Palladino was sitting in her office in a black miniskirt, combat boots, and a T-shirt that read, I FUCKED YOUR BOYFRIEND LAST NIGHT when casting directors Mara Casey and Jami Rudofsky first went in to meet with her and producer Gavin Polone. Scanning her clothing and quirky, ornate office—a fuchsia velvet-covered creation that one staffer described as “the inside of Jeannie’s bottle on I Dream of Jeannie”—the casting directors decided Sherman-Palladino might be open to an unorthodox choice for Sookie: Melissa McCarthy, a little-known comedian performing with the Groundlings.

  “Melissa came in and read, and I thought I was going to pee my pants,” recalls Casey. “I was laughing really hard, and that’s not cool!” Sookie was nothing like the characters McCarthy was known for at Groundlings, which were, Casey says, “broad and crazy and fabulous, eating pizza off the floor and falling over. Sookie wasn’t a broad character, but Melissa was able to infuse it with her sensibilities and her talent.” Sherman-Palladino decided to go to the mat for McCarthy, whose plump figure and zany energy didn’t fit the network-television mold, even for a sidekick role. “It was a tricky sell,” Sherman-Palladino recalled at the ATX Television Festival in 2015. “She is different, and different is sometimes not the easiest thing to embrace.”