The worlds of Gilmore Girls, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Étoile collided on Saturday night as PaleyFest LA hosted a celebration of creator Amy Sherman-Palladino.
The event, dubbed a toast to “The Amy Sherman-Palladino Multiverse,” welcomed Lauren Graham and Kelly Bishop from Gilmore Girls, Rachel Brosnahan, Alex Borstein and Luke Kirby from Maisel and Charlotte Gainsbour and Lou de Laâge from new series Étoile, in which Kirby also stars. Sherman-Palladino and her husband/writing partner Daniel Palladino joined the actors at Hollywood’s Dolby Theatre for a 90-minute reflection on the writer-producer’s stacked resumé.
The conversation began with Sherman-Palladino’s past as a dancer, the start of her writing career on Roseanne — as she deadpanned, “Roseanne was an extraordinarily special show at the time. First of all [Roseanne Barr] was only her first version of crazy; it’s very different now” — and the origin story of both her personal and professional relationship with Palladino.
The writer then recalled pitching Gilmore Girls, noting she was instead pitching something else at the time and when they asked what other ideas she had, “I said, ‘There’s a thing about like a mother and daughter and they’re more like friends than mother and daughter.’ They said, ‘OK, we’ll buy that,’” despite her having developed nothing beyond that premise.
Graham and Bishop also spoke about their journeys to the show, which Graham’s casting as Lorelai complicated by the fact that she was on another show at the time and appeared unavailable, so Sherman-Palladino didn’t want to meet with her.
“I didn’t want to fall in love with her… if I can’t have her, I don’t want to know that she exists,” the creator explained, noting that she did eventually meet Graham and had to pray that her show would get canceled so that she would become available. Graham revealed she was later told by an exec that they “traded” her for another actress that NBC wanted at the time.
Though Gilmore Girls went on to become a massive hit, Sherman-Palladino remembered the initial challenges, including that “I got a call from the studio before the show aired, once a week. They would call and they would say, ‘Listen, just want you to know, the network is very upset and disappointed with you and the work you’re doing.’” She said those calls continued through almost all of pre-production before she told the studio to either fire her or not call her again; they chose the latter and sent her flowers when the pilot premiered.
“It was a very hard show because it was not a teen soap, which they sort of specialized in, and it was not genre so it wasn’t Buffy,” Sherman-Palladino said of The WB, where the series aired. “There was a lot of notes about, ‘Why isn’t [Alexis Bledel’s character] Rory having sex?’ And like, because she’s in fucking high school and not everyone blows someone in the bathroom,” she said to laughs and cheers from the crowd. “Weird pushback on things like that, things about, ‘Why won’t Rory have sex more?’ and ‘Why isn’t [Graham’s character] Lorelai being more of a mom?’ I’m like, because that’s not what the show is.”
Sherman-Palladino joked about the low budget on the show, teasing that while filming on the Warner Bros lot, “Drew Carey [Show] would send us their water and their leftovers and we were very grateful for it. We had zero money, which is why I just walked Lauren in circles in Burbank endlessly because we couldn’t go anywhere. Burbank there’s mountains, but [the show is set in] Connecticut — you figure it out.”
The group also touched on the Gilmore Girls explosion since it’s been available to watch on Netflix and the fan reactions they get, with Graham commenting, “People say to me most frequently, ‘I watched it with my mom, my sister, my daughter and it helped us get through a rough time.’ It’s like a safe place to go to enjoy something with someone who they love.” Palladino added, “We get a lot of people talking about healing from surgeries, from cancer, a lot of that kind of stuff. They watched it with family members while they were healing so that’s always amazing to me, because that’s something we cannot ever plan on as we write these things.”
The evening then shifted to Sherman-Palladino’s 2012 series Bunheads — with a video message from star Sutton Foster — and Maisel, where the creator had a larger budget for the first time. After landing 22 Emmy wins over its five seasons, Borstein said, “I feel like I’m done” when it comes to her career, as Sherman-Palladino responded, “You’re going anywhere — you’re not retiring, that conversation’s over.”
And then Étoile took the stage, previewing the upcoming Prime Video series that follows the dancers and artistic staff of two renowned ballet companies — one in New York, one in Paris — as they embark on an ambitious plan to save their storied institutions by swapping their most talented stars.
“We generally write about blood family because they give endless story; this is not blood family, this is about the family of these collective dance companies in these different cities,” Palladino said. “We were really interested in doing the show about the professionals, about the elite athletes that they become. We were just really interested in the dynamic and the struggle to do it, the interchange, the sexual hijinks.”
Étoile starts streaming April 24.
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