Ep498 - Amy Sherman-Paladino & Daniel Paladino on ‘Gilmore Girls’ & ‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’ by Creative Principles Podcast

“I was ill-equipped to do anything else,” jokes Amy Sherman-Paladino. “It was survival of the fittest maybe. My father was a comic. My mother was a dancer. It was basically, pick something in show business because that’s all you got.”

“We both infuriate inspiring screenwriters because we’re not the people who wrote a ton of spec. We sort of fell into,” says Daniel Paladino. “Amy was a dancer. I was a musician. I got a job as a writer’s assistant because typing in the 80s was a rare commodity because everyone wrote long-hand.”

Turning these handwritten documents into typed screenplays taught Daniel the business. “I think I can do this,” he told himself. “Then, maybe the 10,000 hours of watching TV before that as a child just sort of created a natural flare for it — all the time I wasted in my youth.”

Amy got a job writing for the series Roseanne, where she worked 4 years and wrote 13 episodes. A few years later, there was an opportunity to write a “comedic hour long” where she pitched several ideas. The one she spent the most time on and even optioned IP for led to crickets, but when asked if she had anything else, she replied, “Just this one with a mother-daughter where they’re more like friends than mother-daughter.” This was Gilmore Girls.

“Amy had written 2-3 pilots based on mother-daughter relationships that were different than Gilmore Girls. I remember when she pitched it, thinking this should be the last mother-child pilot you write, and it was ultimately,” jokes Daniel.

Gilmore Girls ran for 154 episodes on the WB and there’s a 4-part mini series on Netflix called Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life. While Gilmore Girls was on, Daniel ran Season 2 of Family Guy. In 2017, going even more personal, the screenwriters delivered The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, about a comedian in the 50s who follows her calling once her husband leaves her.

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