I wrote an essay about Amy Sherman-Palladino for a screenwriting class last semester, and I thought it would be a good idea to post an excerpt on my blog, given the recently confirmed news of the Gilmore Girls Netflix revival. Enjoy!
After a series of stints on sitcoms, Amy Sherman-Palladino wanted to create her own show. She set up a meeting at The WB with then-president Susanne Daniels, who she wanted to work with. She pitched a lot of ideas, but the one The WB was most interested in was the least developed one. This was the pitch that would become Gilmore Girls. All Sherman-Palladino had was a mother and a daughter who were more like friends. “I didn't have a show, mind. I had a relationship.” (AV Club) Sherman-Palladino was then tasked with coming up with a pilot script from there. She and her husband Daniel Palladino (who would become a crucial part of the development of the show) took a vacation to Connecticut, and that caused the development of the “small town” personality of the show. “Our few trips to smaller towns [...] fed into my psychotic version of the warmth and safety of a smaller environment, where people kind of gave a shit about each other.” The small town aspect became very important as the characters began to take shape. “If [Lorelai and Rory] were going to live in a small town in Connecticut, [Lorelai’s] parents needed to be big-city, which–in Connecticut, Hartford is about as big as you're going to get.” (AV Club) It made sense that a 16-year-old Lorelai with a newborn baby escaping the stuffy life of her parents would end up at a completely opposite place: a warm, safe, and accepting small town.
Writing and shooting this pilot was only the first taste of Sherman-Palladino’s excellent skills in creating characters and the worlds that surround them, and also her trademark fast dialogue. “[The pilot] was like 60-something pages. I knew I needed to get it down to 50, but I was just feeling internally that this was right. We shot it and we were 15 minutes short. Legally you cannot put the program on when it’s that short. We had to shoot four extra scenes.” (EW) Throughout the run of Gilmore, Sherman-Palladino and her writing team regularly turned in 70-80 page scripts, all of which fit the regular 43 minutes that aired on television because the characters spoke so fast. It is estimated that Gilmore has 20-to-25 seconds for one page of dialogue, much faster than the standard page-a-minute formula. (WSJ) But this dialogue wasn’t just dialogue to fill pages, or characters talking just to be heard. Every sentence was constructed for a reason, and furthered the plot or the characters in some way. “The show’s characters weren’t caricatures; in fact, its female characters especially possessed uncommon complexity. They were intelligent and ambitious, and also allowed to slip up without fear of being devalued or stabbed in the back by friends. The Gilmore Girls universe was a safe place for women to make (and learn from) mistakes.” (Salon - Paskin) That is a big reason why this show has stood the test of time and has captured the attention of mothers and daughters for 15 years.
Amy Sherman-Palladino, despite not having created many shows, has made a big impact on a lot of people, if only through her work on Gilmore Girls. “Her talent in creating witty conversations, presenting diverse family dynamics, and writing hilarious comedy in Gilmore Girls captured the hearts of many viewers.” (Fusion Film Festival) Her female characters are written with such complexity that they become easy role models for young women, not because they are perfect, but because they show that it’s okay to be imperfect. “Sherman-Palladino also recognized how important it was to let the characters grow and evolve: They didn’t have their educational or personal ambitions stifled, and weren’t shoehorned into awkward situations for the sake of good TV.” (Salon - Zaleski) Sherman-Palladino herself is also a great role model for young women, because she is not afraid to get what she wants. She gave this piece of advice to women: “If you have to be better than the men to get ahead, just be better. Work harder, get it, succeed, and then be in the position to do that for other people. Because that’s what men did.” (Refinery29)
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