“If you’re gonna throw your life away, he’d better have a motorcycle.”
The concerned mother (Lauren Graham) to her teenage daughter (Alexis Bledel) in the pilot for Gilmore Girls
One of the fringe benefits to the success of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel winning seven Emmy Awards is its given new recognition to the Gilmore Girls. Amy Sherman-Palladino, the creator of both shows said that when Gilmore Girls first aired in 2000 it was up against two of the biggest shows at the time (Survivor, Friends) and she didn’t know if her show would find an audience. The WB moved it to another day where it went up against another popular show, American Idol.
But they did find an audience and ran for seven seasons. And it continues to find an audience. Part of its evergreen content is there are always going to be a new crop of teenage and early 20-something girls and their mothers trying to help them navigate through life.
Google “best mother-daughter relationships on TV” and the Gilmore Girls is sure at or near the top of the list. The relationships, the struggles, and the banter and humor all resonate with a core audience. In an interview with Danielle Nussbaum, Sherman-Palladino said that DVDs brought the Gilmore Girls a new audience, and Netflix has brought the show a new binge-friendly audience—many who were under 10 years old when the show originally went off the air in 2007.
Sherman-Palladino is now fresh off her two Emmy wins for both writing and directing The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and pleased Gilmore Girls is getting more exposure to her show that was once described as “where the banter is fast, but the journey is slow.” Here’s how she explained the origins of the Gilmore Girls and the world she created in fictitious Stars Hollow, CT:
“The idea actually came from me just walking into the WB. I really wanted to work with Susanne Daniels, who was head of the WB at the time. I pitched her a bunch of ideas, quite a few that were actually a lot more worked-out than this one. I had been there about 45 minutes, and eyes were glazing over. Everybody was thinking about their lunch, and whether they had calls to return. At the very end, I threw in this one idea about a mother and daughter who are more like friends than mother and daughter, and they’re like, “That’s what we want!” [Laughs.] I didn’t have a show, mind. I had a relationship. I left, and once I verified that they were actually going to pay me to write something, then I had to come up with something.
“Okay, it’s a mother and daughter, and they’re best friends. I was going to put them in a city area, but then I went on vacation to Connecticut, because I wanted to see Mark Twain’s house. I stayed at an inn, and it was very charming, in a tiny town, and everybody seemed to know each other, and there was a pumpkin patch across the street. I went to a diner, and people kept getting up to get their own coffee. No one was there to be waited on. It seemed like a fun environment to put [the characters] in. It happened over a two-day period, as far as place and where they would live. If they were going to live in a small town in Connecticut, the parents needed to be big-city, which–in Connecticut, Hartford is about as big as you’re going to get. Hartford is the insurance capital of the world, so insurance… It all sort of fell into place over that two-day period.”
Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino
2005 A/V Club interview with Scott Tobias
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