Amy Sherman-Palladino’s acclaimed WB series, “GilmoreGirls,” began when the Jewish Valley girl visited the picturesque town ofWashington Depot, Conn., several years ago.
“It was so ridiculously Norman Rockwell,” saysSherman-Palladino, 37, the daughter of ex-Catskills comic Don Sherman. “Like,we’re driving down the street and people are going, ‘Where’s the pumpkinpatch?’ It was so funny, that I thought, ‘I should set something here.'”
“Gilmore’s” fictional town of Stars Hollow, Conn., has itspumpkin patch, but it is also peopled by characters with Sherman-Palladino’srapid-fire speech and vaudevillian wit. Thirty-four-year-old single mom LorelaiGilmore (Lauren Graham) and her brainy 18-year-old daughter/best friend, Rory(Alexis Bledel), spew one-liners faster than Joan Rivers on speed. When Rorybalks at visiting her blue-blood grandparents, Lorelai suggests she can “pull aMenendez” on the way home. When the town’s sluggish postman wonders if aneighbor died, Lorelai asks, “[You mean] while you were delivering her mail?”
“We [also] have a whole run about Lorelai saying she’s goingto get a tattoo of Mel Brooks on her a–,” says Sherman-Palladino, whoseraucous, Borscht Belt humor contrasts with her petite frame. “Part of what’s sofun about the series is putting words in people’s mouths that normally wouldn’tcome out of [them].”
As a result, she says she’s been told “The show sometimessounds like it’s written by an 80-year-old Jewish man.”
“Gilmore’s” Mel Brooksian dialogue, along with its healthybut unusual parent-child relationship, has drawn increasingly scarce”multigenerational” family viewers. Since almost one-third of U.S. familieswith children are headed by single parents, “the non-normal family [hasincreasingly become] the norm” on television, according to Time.”Gilmore” isconsidered among the cream of a TV crop that also includes WB’s “Everwood,”about a single dad in small-town Colorado, and HBO’s mortician-family saga,”Six Feet Under.”
Sherman-Palladino, for her part, grew up in Van Nuys with amom and a dad and a living room full of ex-Catskills comics.
“There were six or seven of them at my house at all times,all trying to outdo each other,” she says on a recent afternoon in herbordello-red office. “It was like the circle of comics in Woody Allen’s’Broadway Danny Rose,’ but … with Shecky Green, Jackie Mason and JanMurray…. They had a rhythm, an energy, a fatalistic way of looking at life –‘so you’re gonna die, have a sandwich!’ — that eventually seeped into mywriting.”
But since Sherman-Palladino’s mother was an ex-dancer, shesays she was supposed to be a “hoofer in a Broadway musical.” She didn’t segueinto writing until she chanced to take an improvisational comedy class at TheGroundlings and hooked up with fellow student Jennifer Heath around 1990.
“We were two short, Jewish, annoying women that no onewanted to deal with, so we dealt with each other,” she told Written Bymagazine.
“But I didn’t want to be a writer, I wanted to beRumpleteaser in ‘Cats,'” she told The Journal.
Heath had another idea. She convinced the reluctantSherman-Palladino to co-author a “Roseanne” script, which promptly landed thenovice writers staff jobs on Roseanne’s hit show. The temperamental star hadfired her entire staff.
“She needed female writers and we were cheap,” saysSherman-Palladino.
She was 24 and learning the sitcom ropes on TV’s hottestcomedy. But her mother wasn’t impressed.
“Even after I was nominated for an Emmy, mom would call andsay, “They’re auditioning for ‘Cats’ over at the church on Highland andFranklin, and can’t you get away for an hour?'”
Four “Roseanne” seasons and several failed sitcom pilotslater, a WB executive urged Sherman-Palladino to pitch an hour-long show to thenetwork. Her response was “Gilmore Girls,” whose pilot featured dialogue shehad scribbled during that fateful trip to Washington Depot.
While Sherman-Palladino is about the same age as thefictional Lorelai, the only similarity she can see between her and thecharacters, is that, like Rory, she didn’t care about being popular in highschool. The rest is fiction; she says she created Lorelai, in part, to have “asingle mother who gave birth at 16 but is not living in a trailer park.”
She created Rory to counter the prevalent TV image of teenagegirls as “either popular or longing to be in the in-crowd.
“Rory, by way of contrast, is comfortable in her own skin,”she says. “She has her mom and her one friend and she’s too busy readingFlaubert to think about having sex.”
For her efforts, the writer-producer was included in Emmymagazine’s 2002 list of the “25 best in the business.”
Now in its third season, the series and its dialoguecontinues to reflect Sherman-Palladino’s Catskills-flavored childhood. Becauseshe believes “comedy must be fast — If it’s slow, it’s not funny” — “Gilmore”scripts feature more than twice the dialogue per page as standard screenplays.Sherman-Palladino even hired a vocal coach to help the actors with their lines:”I try to channel Amy,” Graham said, at a press conference, of her approach toLorelai.
The other characters are as quirky as those on the 1990s CBSseries, “Northern Exposure.” There is a sniffy hotel desk clerk; a klutzy,perfectionist cook; a Korean American antique dealer whose shop is so clutteredpatrons can’t find her, and a rabbi who pals around with the town minister.
Sherman-Palladino says she named the rabbi David Baron,after the Los Angeles clergyman who performed her wedding to “Gilmore”executive producer Daniel Palladino (“Family Guy”) five years ago. Sheintroduced the character in an episode last season to establish that “he andthe minister share church space; it’s the Jews on Saturday and the Christianson Sunday.”
It’s part of her effort to make picture-perfect Stars Hollow”not so uberWASPy,” she says. So does Sherman-Palladino intend to introducemore Jewish characters on the show? She laughs, then lapses intoCatskills-style shtick.
“By year seven, everyone on the show will be Jewish,” shesays. “Believe me, it’s going to be the Chabad telethon.”
“Gilmore Girls” airs Tuesdays at 8 p.m. on the WB.
