Amy Sherman-Palladino: ‘It’s so depressing and upsetting’

GILMORE Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino is not one for mincing her words.

AMY Sherman-Palladino isn’t known for being coy. She’s not one to mince words.

It’s probably why her characters — Lorelai in the Gilmore Girls and Fanny in Bunheads — have always felt dynamic and fully formed.

The writer, director, producer and all-round TV goddess is on the promotional trail for Marvelous Mrs Maisel, the new Amazon TV series she created.

But the timing has coincided with the tsunami of sexual harassment and assault revelations from her industry. The London screening of Marvelous Mrs Maisel occurred just as Louis C.K. was accused of masturbating in front of several women.

She told the audience that change will only come if women stayed angry. She later clarifies to include everyone.

“When I was saying that we need to stay angry, I wasn’t just saying women,” she tells news.com.au. “Women have been angry for a long time and nobody has given a sh*t.

“We need everybody, men and women, in our industry to be angry and upset because this is not something that women can solve by themselves. It’s a whole industry that needs to look at the way they’ve set up the power structure.”

Gilmore Girls remains Amy Sherman-Palladino’s best known work.

Sherman-Palladino is angry, and she’s upset.

“It’s been ridiculous. It’s very depressing to be totally honest with you,” she says. “It’s depressing to keep losing people you admire. I don’t understand why people do these very strange things. It’s a complete mystery to me as to why that is even an exciting thing to do, to put someone in that position is very strange.”

Asked if you can still separate the art from the artist, especially given the news around Louis C.K. and Matthew Weiner (the creator of Mad Men was accused of sexual harassment), two lauded figures in the Golden Age of TV, Sherman-Palladino is adamant you can.

“If we don’t separate the art from the artist, we won’t have any art in our entire history, and that’s just the bottom line” she says. “There are many artists, going back hundreds of years that were probably freaks and did completely inappropriate things. They probably did creepy, sh*tty, weird things.

“At some point, you have to try and separate the art from the weird crap the artist does. I don’t have the answer to this, it’s all very depressing.”

Amy Sherman-Palladino spent four years as a writer on Roseanne while Daniel Palladino worked as a writer on Who’s The Boss?

Frequent collaborator and husband Daniel Palladino wants to emphasise the good in an industry being dragged down by a scandal that’s also engulfed the likes of Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, Brett Ratner, former Amazon Studios boss Roy Price, Pixar boss John Lasseter and Jeffrey Tambor among dozens more.

“The daily drip of revelations makes it seem like the horribly bad behaviour is more prevalent than it actually is,” he says. “We’re very shocked by most of this stuff and have not had direct contact or heard any direct stories about this stuff.

“I think it’s going to feel like there’s an alphabetical list and everyone is implicated in it, which is the most embarrassing and disheartening thing for me and Amy because this is actually a business full of really creative and talented women and men doing what they love to do.

“These bad actors are reflecting on all of us which we’re very embarrassed about, and very upset about.”

The husband-and-wife team has always worked together on projects with a strong female voice, though they have struggled to convey that these shows should appeal to more than women. Palladino says for seven years he was on a “one-man crusade telling every guy I met that [Gilmore Girls] is not for women, it’s for everybody”.

Their new offering, Marvelous Mrs Maisel, may also face the same challenge given its title, bright palette and subject, though Sherman-Palladino and Palladino insist that if it’s marketed correctly, a broader audience will tune in.

Rachel Brosnahan was Emmy-nominated for her work on House of Cards.

Set in 1950s New York, Midge Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan) is a Jewish housewife who inadvertently falls into the world of stand-up comedy. Sherman-Palladino’s father, Don Sherman, was a stand-up comic from that era and she says she grew up hearing about that world, about the goings-on in Greenwich Village and the Catskills — “it was beaten into my head”.

“The comedy that I grew up with had a very Jewish voice to it — the rhythms and cadences of Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner. That was the world, the rhythms I wanted [Midge] to draw from.”

Funny, warm and anchored by a dynamic female lead, the show’s first episode was actually filmed over a year ago, before the Gilmore Girls revival on Netflix.

When she first met with Amazon executives, she didn’t have a concrete idea of what she wanted to write next.

“I blurted out a little something,” she says. “It was this character that was kind of rolling around in my head but not fully formed yet and they said, ‘go write that’ and I had to go home and ask Dan to admit me to a mental hospital because I didn’t really know what that was.

“You’re walking around one day and something bangs into your head, you kind of get obsessed with it. I don’t know that we seek these characters, they just find us.”

Marvelous Mrs Maisel will drop on Amazon Prime Video on November 29.

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