The Return of Amy Sherman-Palladino

[Sylph]

Auteur Writes Herself Another Chance

By DAVE ITZKOFF

BEFORE she had time to savor losing everything, Amy Sherman-Palladino was offered a chance to get it all back, and more.

In September, months after she’d stepped away from her hit television series “Gilmore Girls” and decamped to New York from her native Los Angeles, she was sitting next to her husband and fellow executive producer, Daniel Palladino, in their new production offices in Astoria, Queens.

In a ground-floor studio, a staff imported mostly from California was working on Ms. Sherman-Palladino’s new sitcom for Fox, “The Return of Jezebel James,” while she labored upstairs in a room she had decorated in a faux-bordello style: velvet-upholstered furniture, a plastic pink chandelier dangling over her desk, a lingerie-clad mannequin seated in a window.

Even when she expresses herself through interior design, Ms. Sherman-Palladino can be unexpectedly dangerous. During a fire drill, she recalled, that mannequin was mistaken for a living, breathing person by crew members and firefighters who gathered on the street. But no one dashed into the building to rescue her.

“They naturally thought it was you,” Mr. Palladino said.

“Of course,” Ms. Sherman-Palladino replied. “Because she and I have problems with authority, so it worked out very well.”

It was a joke, but not an exaggeration. Within the television industry Ms. Sherman-Palladino, a spunky, sarcastic writer with a penchant for gothic top hats and fishnet stockings, is recognized as a unique talent, but also a challenging one. (So challenging, she declined to give her age.)

As the creator of “Gilmore Girls,” the comedy-drama that helped to define the WB network (and its postmerger incarnation, CW), Ms. Sherman-Palladino earned a following as a distinctive female voice in a predominantly male field, along with a reputation for being uncooperative and abrasive with her network and studio partners.

Her abrupt and public exit from “Gilmore Girls” in the spring of 2006 over a contract dispute could have left her stigmatized as unmanageable, but her abilities proved too much of a draw. Weeks after her departure was announced, she was working on “Jezebel James,” which Fox has scheduled for a March 14 debut.

For Ms. Sherman-Palladino, the show represents more than the opportunity to put the contentious history of “Gilmore Girls” behind her, to prove that she was right to butt heads, bruise egos and burn bridges to gain the creative latitude she required. Now that she has sold Fox on herself and her methodology, she can demonstrate that she still makes the kind of emotionally engaging television that is worth fighting over.

As Ms. Sherman-Palladino put it, “I don’t want to sit there and go, ‘Ucch, if I had just gone with my instinct, if I had just cast this person, or fought them on this.’ You don’t want to fail not having really put up a fight.”

These sides of Ms. Sherman-Palladino were already in evidence in 1999 when she began developing the series that became “Gilmore Girls.” At the time she was an Emmy Award-nominated former writer from “Roseanne” — one who had both struggled and thrived under that show’s notoriously temperamental star — with an idea for a series about the kinship between a young mother and her precocious teenage daughter.

The pilot script “had so much of Amy’s voice in it,” said Susanne Daniels, a former WB programming executive who is now the president of entertainment at Lifetime. “It was clearly based on relationships that she had lived and knew.” Ms. Sherman-Palladino could be counted on to speak her mind, Ms. Daniels said, and “that element of her, that forthright nature, comes through in her writing too.”

For the six seasons that she produced “Gilmore Girls,” from 2000 to 2006, Ms. Sherman-Palladino (whose husband joined her as an executive producer) built a sizable fan base, but also an enemies’ list at the WB and Warner Brothers Television, the studio that produced the show.

Several executives formerly associated with “Gilmore Girls” said that Ms. Sherman-Palladino could be slow in delivering her scripts and antagonistic to network and studio counterparts who sought plot updates from her. By the end of her run on the show, some of these people knew not to call her at all.

Ms. Sherman-Palladino said that she always provided pitches and outlines well in advance, and that the industry’s most esteemed show runners of that era were not expected to submit finished scripts. “Joss Whedon never gave anyone a script,” she said. “Aaron Sorkin never gave anyone a script.”

A proposed “Gilmore Girls” spinoff was also a source of friction, according to several entertainment executives. They said that Ms. Sherman-Palladino was angered when Warner Brothers Television would not permit her to be the show runner of both “Gilmore Girls” and the spinoff, and when the series order for the spinoff was reduced to 7 episodes from 13.

Ms. Sherman-Palladino said that such contentions were “absolutely false,” adding, “There’s not an ounce of truth in any of that.” (The studio eventually scrapped the project because of budget concerns.)

Some former colleagues said that Ms. Sherman-Palladino has not yet mastered the collaborative nature of television, and her experiences have taught her the deceptive lesson that she is better served by doing things exactly as she pleases than by being a team player.

“She’s someone who did it the way she was told early in her career,” said Jordan Levin, WB’s former entertainment president, who is now a partner at Generate, a talent management firm. “She got burned by that, and then succeeded, and it positively reinforced her doing it her way.”

But the Palladinos were still clearly disappointed by the circumstances that led to their departure from “Gilmore Girls,” which lasted only one more season without them. When she renegotiated her contract with Warner Brothers Television in 2006, Ms. Sherman-Palladino said, she sought more than the one-year extension the studio was offering. The impasse was never resolved, and the Palladinos left the series. (A spokeswoman for Warner Brothers Television declined to comment.)

Asked if she watched any part of the final “Gilmore Girls” season, Ms. Sherman-Palladino simply replied, “No.”

Mr. Palladino added: “It would be work to us. Every word, every frame, every shot, we’d be sitting there going, ‘I wouldn’t do it that way.’ ”

Many critics and fans who did watch were not satisfied, either. In The New York Times Virginia Heffernan wrote: “The show is not faring well” without the Palladinos. “It’s faring weirdly.”

But unemployment proved short-lived; Ms. Sherman-Palladino was approached to develop a show for Fox in August 2006. The network hoped that with her background in traditional, multicamera situation comedy and her ability to appeal to young women, she would create a show that could serve the sizable female audience that was already tuning in to “American Idol.”

Days later she presented the network “Jezebel James,” about a motivated career woman who learns that she is unable to have a child, and turns to her estranged younger sister to carry a baby for her. Fox was enthusiastic enough to order a pilot script, and when that script attracted the interest of Parker Posey and Lauren Ambrose, two New York actresses who did not typically work in sitcoms, the network offered to produce the series in New York — a move that suited the Palladinos just fine.

To accommodate the production of “Jezebel James” in New York, Fox transmitted the show’s table reads, run-throughs and tapings to the network’s offices in Los Angeles, while trying to provide Ms. Sherman-Palladino the breathing room she required. “With Amy you sign on for her vision,” said Marcy Ross, Fox’s executive vice president for current programming. “You have to give her the reins, which I believe we did do, and which the show reflects.”

Even so, familiar difficulties soon crept in: Scripts were rewritten to the very last minute and delivered at lengths of 60 pages or more for a single 22-minute episode, when the rule of thumb is roughly a page a minute. Friday-night tapings stretched into Saturday-morning hours.

“By the end of the week,” Ms. Posey said, “I’m like a wet rag that’s been totally wrung out, stretched, ironed, creased and crumbled and hung out to dry. They’re like, ‘It’ll be a well-oiled machine soon.’ You’re like, ‘In the year two-thousand-and-what?’ ”

Still, the stars of “Jezebel James” said that such hardships were worthwhile if they allowed Ms. Sherman-Palladino to make the show she wanted to make.

“It’s hopefully funny in a way that only girls can be funny,” Ms. Ambrose said. When an actor works in television, she said, “they own you, but when somebody like Amy’s in charge, who’s passionate and very determined, you go, ‘O.K., I’ll put my life for the next thousand years in her hands.’ ”

Despite the dedication of the performers, other factors would seem to bode ominously for the show’s long-term prospects. As production continued on “Jezebel James,” Fox reduced its order to 7 episodes from 13, and while the show was once expected to run in a time slot abutting “American Idol,” it will now be shown on Friday nights. (The network said that both changes were made to accommodate the ever-expanding schedule of “Idol.”)

Over a recent lunch, some three months after they finished work on “Jezebel James,” the Palladinos remained upbeat about their new series, though they acknowledged that so much had happened in the interim — the writers’ strike, for one thing — they felt a certain distance from the entertainment business at large.

They said that if viewers did respond positively to the show, it would not be because of time slots or network promotions, or the association with “Gilmore Girls,” but simply because they feel a connection with the material.

“The first few years at ‘Gilmore,’ ” Ms. Sherman-Palladino said, “I really spent way too much time talking to person after person after person, about marketing and support, and how we’re not just a chick show, we can do more than sell tampons. It never got us anything. It came down to when the audience discovered it, they watched it, and then all of a sudden everybody liked it.”

The strike, they said, had at least afforded them time to contemplate new projects and potential collaborations on projects for film and television, and possibly the Internet. It had also introduced them to more New York-based writers, taught them to recognize the building exteriors of the corporations and studios they were striking against, and helped them get better acquainted with their adopted city.

“We’re often asked if we’re from New York,” Ms. Sherman-Palladino said.

Mr. Palladino added: “Probably half the time it’s a veiled insult. Sort of like: ‘You’re kind of rude and abrupt. Are you from New York?’ ”



http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/arts/television/02itzk.html?ref=television&pagewanted=print