Amy Sherman-Palladino writes television that talks at twice the speed of anything around it and stages it like a dance. The first three seasons of Gilmore Girls are her best work; since then the speed has stayed and the point of it has thinned.
Fi1m perspective
Two people walk across a town square, or down the corridor of an inn, and they do not stop talking. That is the shot Amy Sherman-Palladino keeps coming back to: a long take, the camera keeping pace, and dialogue stuffed with films, bands and old television that nobody pauses to explain. She trained in classical ballet from the age of four before she wrote a word for television, and it shows. Her scenes are choreographed rather than blocked, and a 44-minute episode carries what a rival would spread across an hour.
She started on Roseanne (1988), joining its writing staff in 1990 and leaving after the sixth season, and that is where the method was learnt: a family comedy that took money seriously and was strongest when an uncomfortable subject changed how people treated one another. It also had a weakness she took with her, the sharp remark that arrives so reliably it starts to feel compulsory. Gilmore Girls (2000), made with her husband Daniel Palladino, is the Roseanne lesson at speed. Lorelai had a baby at sixteen and raised her alone in a small Connecticut town; sixteen years on, mother and daughter are closer to each other than either is to anyone else, and the programme is about what that costs. We were moved by it more than anything this quick has a right to manage, because the speed is the point: the talk is how the two of them avoid saying the thing underneath, and every so often the programme lets it out. The first three seasons are as good as network comedy-drama gets. The romances then go round in circles, and the seventh season was made without her; it sounds like her and does not think like her.
After that came Bunheads (2012), a short-lived series about dancers that put the ballet on screen, and in 2016 Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, which let her finish the story she had left. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2017) took the voice to period New York and stand-up comedy, with more money, and it is not better. This is where our reservation lies. Sherman-Palladino has said, "I think every writer has got to direct. If you don't direct, you can't protect your work," and she has protected it thoroughly, writing and directing a great many of the episodes herself. The cost is that nobody is on hand to say when the whimsy has turned to sugar, and on Maisel it turns often.
Étoile (2025) takes her back to ballet, which is probably where she was always heading. Start where she did, with the first three seasons of Gilmore Girls, in autumn, and watch her stage a conversation as if it were a pas de deux. Nobody else on television can do it at that speed. The question now is whether she still has something to say at it.
Biography
Amy Sherman-Palladino is an American television writer, director and producer. Born on 17 January 1966 in Los Angeles, she began her career as a dancer before joining the writing staff of the series Roseanne in 1990, where she remained until 1994.
She created the series Gilmore Girls (2000–2007), on which she also served as writer and director for much of its run, and later created Bunheads (2012–2013) and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2017–2023). She has received six Primetime Emmy Awards, including for Outstanding Comedy Series, Outstanding Directing for a Comedy Series and Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series, all for The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. She was the first woman to win in the comedy writing and directing categories in the same year.
