"Gilmore" survivors exhale
Is Lauren glad Amy is gone?
Lauren, for those of you not fully initiated into the cult of the “Gilmore Girls,” is Lauren Graham, who plays the flaky, funny mom on “Gilmore Girls,” and Amy is Amy Sherman-Palladino, the flaky, funny writer-producer who created and has overseen the show since it signed on the WB network six years ago.
Recently the CW network, which is picking up where the WB left off, announced it could not reach a new deal with Sherman-Palladino and her husband, Dan, also a producer on the show.
“Gilmore Girls” would continue on the CW, but Team Palladino would not. Fans were mortified.
“The news we’ve all been dreading has now been made absolutely, 100 percent, painfully official,” Michael Ausiello wrote rather dramatically at TVGuide.com.
But after the Monday press conference before the nation’s TV critics to promote “Gilmore Girls,” you couldn’t help thinking that Graham was glad the Palladinos had left, and that the show is going to be better off without them.
When Graham mentioned early in the session that she wasn’t a huge fan of a major storyline from Season 5, ears perked up. Graham was referring to her character Lorelai becoming estranged from her daughter Rory (Alexis Bledel), even though — as fans at the time complained — the whole point of the show is the mother-daughter bonding thing.
That passed, but the Palladinos tinkered again last season. Lorelai got engaged to her boyfriend Luke (Scott Patterson), only to turn into a meek, submissive type who let herself get ordered around.
Again, Graham offered that morphing from a strong woman into a doormat “wasn’t my favorite stuff to play.” Nor, judging from online bulletin boards, was it viewers’ favorite stuff to watch. These “Gilmore Girls” scripts were produced by the Palladinos.
When a critic pointed out to Graham that she had just said she loved the first script of the new, Palladino-free season, her eyes widened.
“If you write anything that makes me sound like I said something negative about Amy and Dan, I will be upset,” said Graham. “But they really, you know, liked to run things in a certain way that was specific to the two of them and that was more, I guess, hands-on.”
The CW announced Monday it will begin programming Sept. 20. The new “Gilmore Girls” season will start Sept. 26.
•“Just make it funny and people will (want to) see it. Most things suck. If something’s funny, people will know.” — Chris Rock, explaining why he’s not worried about “Everybody Hates Chris” moving to a new network (CW) and a new night (Sunday)
•“I read The Da Vinci Code , loved it … but there were not enough characters in that book. I was thinking like Veronica thinks: OK, how many characters are there? And there were only like four or five they had introduced, and I went through all of them and I figured it out by Page 200.” — actress Kirsten Bell of “Veronica Mars,” on how having to deal with the show’s convoluted storylines has made her sharper
•“I think of it as the gift that keeps on giving.” — actress Leslie Hope of the new CW thriller “Runaway,” on being recognized as Mrs. Jack Bauer four years after her character was killed off of “24”
•“We always say, ‘If one of the Mowrys got it, then we all got the role.’” — actress Tia Mowry, who got the part on the CW comedy “The Game” that her twin sister Tamera also auditioned for
•“You know what’s exactly like ‘The Sopranos’? World Cup soccer. The Italians won. Everybody watched. And now they’ll go away for four years.” — publicist Keith Marder, warming up the critics before the CW presentation
