Photo Caption : A scene from "The Return of Jezebel James," with
Parker Posey, left, and Lauren Ambrose, created by Amy Sherman-
Palladino for FOX.
By DAVE ITZKOFF
Published: March 2, 2008
BEFORE she had time to savor losing everything, Amy Sherman-Palladino
was offered a chance to get it all back, and more.
Librado Romero/The New York Times
Caption : Amy Sherman-Palladino, with her husband, Daniel Palladino.
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.
"Gilmore Girls," with Lauren Graham, left, and Alexis Bledel,
outlasted Amy Sherman-Palladino by only a year.
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?'
"
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