فصل 15

15

SEASON ONE

The first scene we filmed is the first scene you see in the pilot: a guy in Luke’s hits on Rory, and then Lorelai, and we reveal they aren’t girlfriends, as he assumed, but in fact mother and daughter. Watch it back and you won’t believe you’re watching a young actress (Alexis) in her first on-camera scene. Also, what’s so funny about this pilot by today’s standards is that while the dialogue is delightful from the start, nothing really happens for the first fifteen or twenty minutes, until Rory gets into Chilton and Lorelai has to ask her parents for money. Today, if a mother and daughter speaking clever dialogue didn’t also reveal themselves to be surgeons, werewolves, or undercover detectives by the end of the teaser, we’d never be picked up. Also, we all look twelve years old.

Frankly, what I remember most when I watch this season is the degree to which I was on an adrenaline-fueled dialogue high the whole year, if that makes any sense. I hadn’t had material this dense since back in acting school. I found the pace and sheer volume of it exhilarating. Rather than being tired out by the long hours, I had extra energy as a result. I slept about four hours a night and still felt great. I ran every day at lunch in the WB gym. Ah, youth!

Watching Scott Patterson this season reminds me—you know, that part wasn’t necessarily the inevitable love interest for Lorelai that it became. He was simply Cute Grouchy Diner Owner in the beginning, and it could have gone in any number of directions, but Luke took on a more important role because of Scott’s special sexiness, which was mixed with a gruffness that was the perfect contrast to Lorelai’s chirpy cheerfulness. Watch and learn, young actors—if you’re interesting, the camera finds you.

Kelly Bishop and Ed Herrmann were perfectly cast as Emily and Richard. They both exude aristocratic elegance that tells you right away the kind of household Lorelai grew up in, and why she might have found it a bit stuffy at times. As actors, they both have emotional depth and impeccable comic timing. Plus, as people, they’re pure joy to be around.

A few months into filming that year, I remember Alexis and I went to see Melissa McCarthy perform in the Groundlings for the first time, and we were completely blown away by her. I wondered then if anyone would ever figure out a way to expose how uniquely talented she was. Of course her Sookie character was a delight, but could she find a way to showcase the other hilarious and original characters she was able to create? Why yes, People. Yes, she could.

David Sutcliffe’s Christopher is so appealing it makes you wonder once in a while if Lorelai and Rory’s dad should have stayed together after all. And Yanic Truesdale created such a unique character in Michel, especially since, in person, he’s warm and funny and hardly ever suffers from ennui like Michel does.

So many other special players make Stars Hollow what it is: I’m always wowed by Sally Struther’s humor and warmth, Liz Torres’s sultry delivery, and Sean Gunn’s total commitment to whatever Kirk’s new passion is. I love the fun feuds between Lane and Mrs. Kim, Michael Winters makes those long Taylor speeches look effortless, and Rose Abdoo’s Gypsy is just a gem. Most other shows on the WB at the time were peopled with young hotties. I love that we were peopled with a lot of interesting people.

Times were different: Lorelai complains when Emily tries to install a DSL line, claiming she doesn’t need one. AHAHAHA, yes, you do, Lorelai, and just you wait a few years till your BlackBerry stops working altogether. Rory wonders if there’s still hope for Sean Penn and Madonna (there isn’t!); Kelly complains about kids today wasting their time watching “MTV and a hundred TV channels,” which doesn’t seem like all that many by today’s standards; and I write my number down for Max Medina on a business card!

Fashion and hair: Wow, lots of leather blazers and blue eye shadow? For some reason, I was very into blue eye shadow this year. My makeup artist at the time worried it was a bit much, but I liked anything bright and bold for Lorelai. Donna Karan nylons abound. They were new and very popular; there were no Spanx back then, and these stockings, with serious control top built in, were revolutionizing ladies’ stomachs all across the land. My skirts are very short this year and my hair is veeeeery black and I remember there was much discussion about what to do about it. (The hair, not the skirts. No one in the history of television has ever worried about skirts being too short.) Boring but important hair note: The color was just one of my hair issues. My hair is also naturally curly and extremely sensitive to the weather. This means that in order for me to wear it curly, it has to first be straightened, then curled, which sort of defeats the whole supposed “luck” of having naturally curly hair in the first place. So figuring out how best to make it last throughout a fourteen-hour day took some experimentation over the years. Stay tuned for the exciting results!

What I love: There are so many great episodes from this year, but for me, the show really hits its stride in episode six, “Rory’s Two Birthdays,” where the Gilmores have a very fancy party for Rory that’s in stark contrast to the cozy one Lorelai throws, full of junk food and a cake with Rory’s face on it and Stars Hollow locals. Kelly is marvelous in the scene in Lorelai’s bedroom where she sees a picture of Lorelai with a broken leg and they both really begin to get, in a new way, how much they’ve missed not being part of each other’s lives. From the start of the show, Kelly named herself my TVM, or TV mom, by which she meant she was taking her character’s role seriously, beyond the pages or the sets and out into the real world. Right away we developed the easy rituals of old friends: meeting for lunch at Joe Allen in New York, or out for guacamole at our favorite Mexican place in L.A., or allowing ourselves to split a little bag of Cheetos when we were filming in the middle of the night. In a maternal, protective way, she found most of my boyfriends at the time lacking, and once told me I needed someone who was more my equal, like “that wonderful actor on Six Feet Under.”

Hmmmm.

Season finale: Over the course of this first season, we began to realize that our tough time slot might actually have been a gift. What expectation could the network possibly have for us to get any ratings against such tough competition? Yet bit by bit, we began to accumulate nice notices and loyal viewers.

In the last episode, Rory finally says “I love you” to Dean, and Max Medina proposes to Lorelai with a thousand yellow daisies. (Although, weirdly, he does it over the phone.) If you’ve ever seen series creator Amy Sherman-Palladino in person or read her interviews, you already know she’s very, very funny, and very, very bright. But the mind of the person who conceives of such a grand romantic gesture as this? Genius.