Screwball Television: Critical Perspectives on Gilmore Girls

1. “Impossible Girl”: Amy Sherman-Palladino and Television Creativity

3 “ImpossibleGirl” Amy Sherman-Palladino and Television Creativity D AV I D L AV E R Y Let’s face it: I’ve peaked. This is it. It’s all downhill for me or after this show. To be able to create a show that they let you do what you want to do, they let you write what you want to write, they let you put your crazy references in, to be able to work with really top-notch actors . . . it happens once. Once! Seriously. It’s all over . . . It’s just me under a bus after this. —A M Y S H E R M A N-PA L L A DI NO (“Welcome to the Gilmore Girls,” Season One DVD supplemental feature) Many people in the business will refer to a woman who did something or acted a certain way as “crazy.” I then say, “You have to define what ‘crazy’ is.” To me, crazy is not someone who has a creative vision and will fight for it. —A M Y S H E R M A N-PA L L A DI NO, quoted in Created by . . . : Inside the Minds of TV’s Top Show Creators, by Steven Priggé Is she Jewish or something? —T. J. (M IC H A E L DE LU I S E), asking Luke (Scott Patterson) about Lorelai (Lauren Graham), in “The UnGraduate” (6.03) During the second season of Roseanne (ABC, 1988–97)—a critically successful, long-running sitcom dealing with working-class issues and frequently labeled the “anti–Cosby Show”—a young writer named Joss 4 | Authorship,Genre,Literacy,Televisuality Whedon wrote several episodes (including “Little Sister” and “BrainDead Poets Society”). The movie version of his then already conceived script for Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) was still in his future, as were the three television series that would establish his reputation among cult fans of quality TV: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (WB/UPN, 1997–2003), Angel (WB, 1999–2004), and Firefly (FOX, 2002–4). The year after Whedon left the show a new member of the team, Amy Sherman-Palladino (hereafter referred to as “AS-P”), and her partner, Jennifer Heath, would be admitted to the Roseanne writers’ room. Over the next four seasons (1990–94), she would author, both with Heath and on her own, more than a dozen episodes—stories in which Roseanne (Roseanne Barr) and Dan (John Goodman) shop for a new bed, Becky (Sarah Chalke) runs away from home and begins using birth control, a Halloween prank inspires revenge, and Roseanne deals with her father’s death, meets his mistress, and gets breast-reduction surgery. In the fourth and sixth seasons, AS-P would have the honor of writing the season premieres. Whedon and AS-P are both products of show-business families (her father was a Catskills and Borscht Belt “king of the cruise lines” [Heffernan 2005] comic);1 for both, Roseanne was only a warm-up exercise, an apprenticeship. Her greatest creative achievement—the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that would enable her to imaginatively rule over a “bizarro little niche” on television (Tobias 2005) but leave her with no alternative but to throw herself under a bus when it would come to an end—lay ahead of her. 1. Sherman-Palladino recalls, “Growing up, my father was, and still is, a professional comic. My mother was a professional dancer. So, I grew up in a show-business family that had the attitude, ‘You want to go to college? What’s that for?’ I did take a lot of dance classes and acting classes. Many of my father’s friends were comedians, and since they hung around our house, I was exposed to comedy at an early age, knew about Lenny Bruce when I was very, very young. I think that atmosphere really helped me with my writing” (Priggé 2005, 51). Whedon, of course, is perhaps the world’s only third-generation television writer: both his father, Tom, and his grandfather John wrote for the small screen from the 1950s through the 1990s. “ImpossibleGirl” | 5 In “Twenty-one Is the Loneliest Number,” a Season Six episode of Gilmore Girls (6.07) written by AS-P, a rare visit by Richard Gilmore to daughter Lorelai’s Stars Hollow home leads to an argument between the two over Rory’s future now that she has dropped out of Yale. When Richard’s...