Why ‘Gilmore Girls’ Is the Ultimate Fall TV Show
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Fall is here and Gilmore Girls fans know what that means: It’s time to head to the fictional Connecticut town of Stars Hollow. Viewers stream the cult classic year-round on Netflix but there’s something magical about tuning into the lives of Lorelai (Lauren Graham) and Rory (Alexis Bledel) Gilmore in the fall season.
The show originally premiered on The WB in October 2000 and has cemented itself as arguably the go-to television series to enjoy while the leaves change color and people pay visits to pumpkin patches and apple orchards as Halloween and Thanksgiving approach. From the cozy, harvest set designs to the characters’ wardrobes and everything in between, Gilmore Girls’ aesthetic is synonymous with autumnal goodness.
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The fall season is in Gilmore Girls’ DNA. As the show’s celebrated creator Amy Sherman-Palladino explained, she came up with the entire concept when she and her husband Daniel Palladino visited the small town of Washington Depot, Connecticut, around the month of October. She was so charmed by the whole experience that she based Stars Hollow and all of its characters on it.
Twenty-three Octobers after Gilmore Girls first aired, Sherman-Palladino reflected on how she focused on fall elements when making the original series, what it felt like to get the gang back together and make the Netflix revival, and why she thinks the show has sustained its reputation as the quintessential TV series to binge during autumn. She also shared that if she makes more Gilmore episodes someday, she’d want to flesh out Lane Kim’s (Keiko Agena) storyline and she’s also interested in potentially exploring Rory raising another Gilmore generation — maybe even a boy, this time.
Why do you think so many people gravitate toward Gilmore Girls this time of year?
I think it just feels festive. On a purely production design-level, those were always our favorite shows to do because everything was pretty. We had no budget on Gilmore Girls so it was all twinkle lights and pumpkins and yet, you can do a lot with twinkle lights and pumpkins. I think it just feels like it’s that golden time, it harkens back to its Connecticut location: It’s cold, you’ve got to put a sweater on, there’s accessories. I think it’s just sort of lent itself visually to a really kind of fun, festive time. It feeds into that small town wish fulfillment of, “Gee, wouldn’t it be nice if we all lived in a cute little town where there’s nothing but pumpkins and hayrides and everybody knows each other?”
When you were making Gilmore Girls, was it your intention to lean into the season of fall and focus on fall elements or do you think that’s something fans have decided to love and focus on about the series?
Well, when I sold Gilmore Girls it was a fluke. I was actually trying to pitch a different story and they were bored out of their minds by the other idea that I had, so they were sort of like, “You have anything else?” and I said, “Well, you know, what about a show about a mother and daughter who are more friends than mother and daughter?” And they were like, “Great, we’ll buy that, go, get out, you’ve been here long enough.” So I had to figure out what the show was because I really hadn’t thought about it that much. My husband [Daniel Palladino] and I were coincidentally going away that weekend to see Mark Twain’s house in Connecticut and it was fall, it was around October, and all of that was evident in this small town. There were signs that said, “Hayrides on Friday nights,” and there was a pumpkin patch. Somebody pulled over and said, “We’re looking for the apple-picking.” It was all very beautiful and cute and I said to Dan, “It’s like Central Casting came out and created this town. Do people really live like this?” That was the day that I went back to the inn [we were staying at], I got a little pad that was in the room, and I wrote a bunch of notes on it. That’s sort of where I created the whole show. It all tumbled out and I think because I was affected at that particular time with those particular visuals, we leaned into that. It’s an element I wanted the show to have.
Also, doing the show on a shoestring budget where we were going to be walking in a circle [on a studio lot] in Burbank, California, where we’re not actually going to be anywhere on the East Coast, I thought it was important to have a visual context for the show since we weren’t going to be able to go out on location. We couldn’t even afford our own water. We drank Drew Carey’s leftover water. We always tried to do something for the summer and we always had to do a snow episode so that we had that snow feel. Our favorite times were also always those pumpkin, golden, fall scenes because visually it told a lot about who the characters were, who they were to each other, and this world that Lorelai had chosen to raise her kid in. She ran from a different kind of environment to live in this place that would have crazy pumpkin patches and festivals. That’s where she wanted to sort of stake her claim.
As someone who grew up in Connecticut, I can confirm that you nailed it.
It’s real. I grew up in California where everything was different shades of brown and beige. It was a cruel cosmic joke that I was born there. I’m an East Coaster and they put me in California to make my life miserable and to make sure that I had something to hold against my parents for the rest of their lives. As soon as I got to New York I was like, “Finally, I’m home.” But you go to these small towns and they just envelope you. It suddenly feels like you want the family to get together at Christmas and all be in the same house. That’s typically a nightmare. When I get out of the small town and get back to Brooklyn I’m like, “I’m crazy. I don’t want my whole family in one house together.” We avoid that. But when you go to Connecticut, it just feels like that’s what it should be: Home, family, closeness, friends, and everything smells like apple cider. It has a warmth and a happiness to it that I think people in an unhappy world gravitate toward.
Unless it’s a Friday night dinner with Emily and Lorelai, then maybe it’s not all warm and fuzzy. Is there a particular episode, scene, or season of Gilmore Girls that comes to mind for you when you think about a quintessential fall moment in the series?
It’s hard because we did a lot of them. Our snow episodes were also the ones that I particularly loved. First of all, we only got one day of snow. Again, I don’t know if I mentioned, we had no money and snow is very expensive. That feeling of when we have Lorelai and Rory in a sled and Bjork is playing is the greatest moment of my life ever.
OG fans loved the show when it aired on The WB and then a new generation of viewers found Gilmore on Netflix. Now some people are even discovering it on TikTok and social media. What do you think about the ways people are finding Glimore Girls because of evolving technology and media?
I think it’s ironic they’re finding the show because of technology and yet the show has no technology in it. We’re in a whole world of TikTok and Instagram and yet when we started the show, I think the characters had pagers. There were no cell phones. They still had answering machines when they came home and were hoping they had a message and there was a light blinking. I think it’s so nuts that we have a world that’s run on our phones and not one element of that is in Gilmore at all. I think they got cell phones toward the end and yet people are connecting with it, which is sort of antithetical. I mean, why? Wouldn’t the kids watch this show and kind of go, “What? They had to pick up a phone and actually call somebody? I don’t understand what this is. Are we on Mars?” I think it’s a surprising thing. It’s great. I’ve got 10-year-olds coming up to me going, “Gilmore Girls is my favorite show,” and I’m like, “You were not even an idea in your parents’ mind when this show came out so it’s just weird that you like it.”
Technology aside, why do you think so many people across generations are connecting with the themes and characters on the show even though it was made decades ago?
I think we have a very fractured world and I think that the things that people thought were going to connect everybody and bring them together we’re finding are not doing that. I think this is a show about connection and family and relationships, and there’s a lot of comedy in it. You can watch it and enjoy yourself. You don’t have to feel horrible for 45 minutes. You don’t have to worry about the end of the world. You can laugh. I also think there’s an aspirational aspect to the thought of, “Wouldn’t it be great if my mother and I could spend longer than five minutes together without plotting each other’s death? That would be great.” Believe me, I’m stunned. I’m completely, completely stunned. This show is so much bigger now than when it was on the air and when it went on Netflix, everything started all over again. It’s amazing. Lauren Graham and I often just sit there and kind of look at each other like, “What?” Both of us are like, “We don’t understand how this happened.” It’s great, though.
You made the first show in the vacuum but when you went back to make the revival, were you considering the show’s rabid fan base? Did you think about how so many people would be paying attention to every little detail?
Well, I’m very self-absorbed so I really just think about myself. But when we went back [and made the revival], the only reason that, quite frankly, we even thought it was possible to go back and do it is because selfishly we didn’t get to finish the show. I wasn’t there that last year and I still honestly haven’t even seen that last season because it was too painful. But I did have Lauren [Graham] calling me once a week saying, “Hey, I’m going to read you what I have to say this week.” So when we got that revival together, I felt like I had to finish it. I opened my big fucking mouth and said, “I know the last four words of the series.” Maybe Amy, shut the fuck up. It became such a thing that I was kind of, like, “I think I’ve got to follow through on my big-mouth promise.”
When Gilmore was [originally] being made, we were so frantic and we were working so hard. We worked so many hours. There were 22 episodes back then, our page count was so high, and it was just a really hard, hard, hard shoot to do. [The revival] felt like a chance for us all to come back together and for me, Lauren [Graham], Alexis [Bledel], and Kelly [Bishop] to kind of just hold on to each other and end it the way we felt it should have ended in the first place. Also, Ed [Herrmann] had died and we were all feeling very sad because we never got to say goodbye and we wanted to say goodbye. There were actually quite a few emotional reasons that we got together and decided to do it. We had all of these visions that we’ll have all of this time but no, it was exactly the same thing. We had no time. We put snow down and they were literally hoovering up the snow behind us as we were finishing the scene. It was like it was the same sort of frantic, breakneck pace but we did get to do it together and we got to bring it home together. That was important to all of us.
It’s been seven years since the reboot was released on Netflix. I know people always ask you if you would do more Gilmore Girls episodes and you’ve said you’re open to it. If you were to do another iteration of Gilmore, are there any particular storylines you’re interested in exploring? Are there still stories in that universe you want to tell?
Well, the thing about families is they never work their shit out. They are dysfunctional forever and because of that, it’s the best possible way to come up with stories because you will never solve your problems there. It will always be what it is. There were a couple of things [I wanted to explore] but we just didn’t have the time. I really never liked the way Lane’s life shook out. I would have liked to have spent more time on her, especially since she’s patterned after my best friend. Sorry, Helen [Pai]. And I think it would be interesting to see a baby and a kid and what that next Gilmore Girl round would be.
I really never liked the way Lane’s life shook out. I would have liked to have spent more time on her, especially since she’s patterned after my best friend. Sorry, Helen [Pai]. And I think it would be interesting to see a baby and a kid and what that next Gilmore Girl round would be.
I think there’s definitely interesting things there but honestly, it was such a kismet before [for the first revival]. We’d all gotten together for some panel in Texas. Everybody was there and we just looked around and it was a moment of: We’re all here, no one hates each other, we’re all getting along, should we jump back in and finish the show? It had an engine that was not manufactured, it just sort of happened. I feel like it would need to be a similar kind of thing [to do another one]. It would need to be Lauren [Graham] and I stumbling out of a bar drunk in the middle of the night and inspiration strikes and we figure out something.
Running a show is magic, in a way. You can’t know when you start these things if something is going to connect with people or when the cast is going to be the perfect cast. It’s something that just happens and because of that, I’m personally a believer in that middle of the night feeling where your eyes open and you’re like, here we go. I think we’re all feeling like if that happens, we’re game to jump in again.
I think I speak for many of us when I say fans would love to watch a Lane spinoff.
I love Lane. It’s so weird because K-pop is so huge now and one of the storylines that we had to drop because we just didn’t have enough time to shoot it — or enough money, frankly — was we wanted Mrs. Kim to manage a K-pop band. This was years before I even knew who BTS was. I sort of feel like, goddammit. That K-pop story would’ve been so cool.
And you’re right, it would be really interesting to see Rory and Lorelai raise another baby. I would love to watch those women try to raise a little boy. I wonder if there is a place for a little boy in that universe?
There’s a place for little boys everywhere. Little boys raised by sharp, interesting women is never a bad thing.
Gilmore Girls is also a great example of a show that was popular when it aired but once it hit streaming, it really catapulted into the zeitgeist and reached new levels of popularity. I spoke to some GG actors about this in light of the WGA and SAG strikes this year and they mentioned how they don’t feel like actors’ current contracts with streamers fairly reflect what they should be paid in an instance like this one, which is something so many actors are fighting for right now. What do you think about that?
The unfortunate thing about contracts is you’re always 10 years behind the issue and that is a problem. Fuck, the Writers Guild never got paid for DVDs and now no one buys DVDs anymore. It’s tricky to be able to see what the issue is at the moment. Now, I will say 15 years ago when we struck, myself and many others brought up the idea of residuals and said that nothing had been addressed residual-wise. It was one of those issues that the guild was like, “We’ll get to that but that’s not going to be in this contract.” Well, we got to it, we’re here, and the problem is this is a business that is deeply, deeply entrenched and you kind of need to get in while they’re still figuring it out because once it’s figured out, getting in and wrestling stuff away [from the studios] is tough.
I feel for everybody. There’s so many things that are different with the streaming world than traditional television. It’s boring because we’ve been talking about it forever, but you know, there’s less [episodes]. I know that on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel I worked the same amount of months in the year on eight episodes as I did on 22 episodes of Gilmore Girls. That’s a huge thing when you step back from that and you think, OK, that means everybody got paid for eight episodes as opposed to 22 in the same amount of time. It’s super, super tricky and I don’t think that we have totally figured it out yet.
I wish the actors well. It’s hard because the streaming world happened fast and it took over quicker than I think anybody thought it was going to. Then everybody wanted to be Netflix and then the bottom dropped out of Netflix, and then the bottom dropped out of everybody. It’s a very complicated thing and yes, people should be compensated for their work and they should be compensated for their time and compensated if there is success. The whole time that Gilmore Girls was in existence, all I heard from the studio was, “We’re not making any money off of Gilmore Girls. We just lose money on Gilmore Girls because there’s no overseas [viewers], it’s about two girls, who cares about the girls?” And then the next thing you know, it’s a very enduring show that had a long life. Clearly they made some money off of Gilmore Girls, clearly that was an incorrect message. The studios are their own little world and to crack into that world and wrestle things away [is hard]. They don’t want to share their toys.
I wish that there was a way that now we could be focusing on the next thing that’s coming down the pipeline because there’s going to be something else. In four years, we’re going to be pissed off about something else and if we could figure out what that something else is now, we could really get a toehold now as opposed to when it’s already [an issue]. The business is already what the business is. You can’t tear it apart and start again. There will be no business. Maybe this will open the doors for network television to start doing better shows and maybe people can turn back to a little bit of traditional television and that would be good. Competition is always good. Right now there’s no competition. The streamers own everything. They’re Goliath.
In the years since Gilmore originally aired, some fans have speculated that if the show aired today maybe it would’ve been more respected and critically acclaimed, and maybe would’ve even earned a few Emmy nominations.
Or maybe it would have been ignored completely because there’s 40,000 shows on the air. Things happen for a reason. I’m not a huge believer in fate but stars align in certain moments, so I don’t know. Gilmore came of age in a time where comedies did not have to be so brutal. People expect comedies to be brutal now. Everyone has to be a murderer and it’s hilarious when you shoot someone’s head off or someone’s a drug addict. There’s a roughness to it, and I’m not putting any of these companies down. I watch all this shit and I enjoy it. But Gilmore came of age in a time where there was space to do a comedy about women that was small. It was not driven by a giant gimmick or plot. We were very stingy with the plot on Gilmore, very stingy. We doled it out slowly by design and that is also not necessarily the way things work or the way people consume things these days. I think it happened at the right time and it’s being rediscovered because of the climate now, because there aren’t gentle shows out there as much. There’s time to live in Stars Hollow. We did 22 episodes for seven years. There’s time to exist there and get to know the people. That’s hard to do when you’re in a world of six, eight or ten episodes at the max.
As far as awards, it’s always nice when someone gives you a chicken dinner but they’re not everything. The only award that ever bothered me was I just thought Lauren Graham was so exceptional and the work that she did on that show was so hard. She was doing something no one else was doing, especially at that time, with being as funny as she was with her amazing acting and driving this show home. I just always felt like her not getting acknowledged will be something that bothers me for the rest of my life.
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