“Gilmore Girls” creator Amy Sherman-Palladino says TV has changed so much in the past 15 years, the show simply couldn’t exist today.
“Today, you don’t sell ‘Gilmore Girls,’ nobody buys it,” Sherman-Palladino, the show’s co-creator, said on Saturday during her panel ahead of the “Gilmore Girls” reunion at ATX Television Festival. She argued that it was only because of the lack of bureaucratic obstacles from the Warner Bros. network that “Gilmore Girls” was able to flourish as it did when she first sold the idea for the show in 2000.
“It was a time when a network wasn’t looking for a cohesive brand,” she continued. “Their brand was about the individual voices of the show.”
Sherman-Palladino is an especially individual voice, to say the least. “I don’t like rules,” she quipped.
Amy Sherman-Palladino already being her fantastically eccentric self #ATXFestival #ATXGilmoreGirls pic.twitter.com/zzpsPCtWLz
— Lauren Duca (@laurenduca) June 6, 2015
“They kind of just left us alone, which doesn’t happen anymore,” she said. “We kind of just ran wild like crazy meth kids around the Warner Brothers lot.”
One of the things she and her husband and co-creator, Dan Palladino, did with that freedom was to cast Milo Ventimiglia without even having a part for him. She thought he was “cute” and decided to sign him before someone else did, before ever thinking up the role of Jess.
That free rein, though, came to an end. Ultimately, Sherman-Palladino left before the final season, due to contract disputes as the WB switched over to become the CW.
“It’s always a bummer when you have to end things,” she said. “I had hoped there would be a call, like, ‘Hey, it’s the last episode, do you want to end it?’ But that didn’t happen.”
“It was a wonderful, golden time,” she added with a sigh. “But it ended.”
UPDATE 10:30 p.m. ET – At the “Gilmore Girls” reunion Saturday evening, Sherman-Palladino was asked what would happen if the show was pitched in 2015. The series creator echoed her sentiments from earlier in the day: “They would validate my parking,” she said.
“For the first 25 minutes, nothing happens. You just meet these charming people,” Lauren Graham agreed, describing the pilot. “You would never have that today! There would have to be explosions before the first commercial. [Watching that] it really struck me how things have changed.”
Lauren Duca is currently covering the ATX Television Festival for The Huffington Post. Follow her on Twitter @laurenduca and expect much more to come!
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