Sep 05 2020 36 mins 51
This week, Elvis Mitchell welcomes the Emmy-winning showrunners Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino of ‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. The duo also helmed the series ‘The Gilmore Girls’ and ‘Bunheads.’ They address how their wide-ranging taste in music informs the tone and rhythm of ‘Maisel,’ and they discuss how their signature rapid-fire dialogue can actually make the infrequent moments of quiet even more powerful. The following interview excerpts have been abbreviated and edited for clarity. KCRW: Welcome to the treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. My guests have taken the world of TV by storm over the past few years. So going back to, of course, ‘Gilmore Girls’ and one of my favorites: ‘Bunheads.’ Their newest success on Amazon is 'The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’ in its third season. I'm talking, of course to Amy Sherman-Palladino, and Dan Palladino. Your characters are so much about taste, and their taste about things and asserting their tastes. I mean, going back to 'Gilmore Girls,' and even in the pilot episode where Suzy is giving the speech to Midge and saying that she believes in her and she sees in her something that nobody else sees, and it's really a reflection of her taste. And sort of making that stamp and putting it out there for Midge to see. I wonder where that comes from for you guys. Amy Sherman-Palladino: Well, we're very opinionated. Daniel Palladino: No, we're not. Sherman-Palladino: The more specific a character is, the more I think people can get behind the character. And, you know, pilots are a very tricky thing because in a pilot, you have to make the audience invest in a character they don't know, invest in a backstory that they are just being fed pieces of, and then sign on for the ride. It’s a tricky dance. And so to lay out your case, so to speak, I think that for us, it's always been a: fun and also to help sort of really define where the character is coming from to put very specific tastes out there, whether it be mentioning the kind of books that they read, which will say, you know, whether they are a book reader or not, or the kind of music that they listen to, or the kind of movies or information that they want to talk about. It can say a lot about who the character is in a short amount of time. Palladino: Yeah, I mean, weirdly, like in TV over the many, many decades, you very, very rarely see people watching TV on TV. It's something that we writers forget is consuming media like TV, movies, books and magazines and stuff like that is what people do a lot every day. And yet so many movies and television shows don't show people actually doing these things. So on ‘Gilmore Girls,’ we always had the girls watching a lot of TV and commenting on the TV, which is what I think people do, especially since March of 2020. So yeah, we have people consume things and debate them and sometimes proselytize them. It's sort of what we all do everyday kind of naturally. It's the fun of everyday life. Sherman-Palladino: Also, you know, something specific, like ‘Maisel’ is about discovering possibilities within yourself that you may not have known was even there. So it's important to have somebody else that sees it. Sometimes, we walk around the world thinking we're not special or we don't stand out, and sometimes it takes somebody to go, ‘Hey, you're the person that did that thing.’ And you're like,’ oh, wow, someone noticed.’ And that is what Susie and Midge are for each other. They are two women who, in any other circumstance, would have nothing to do with each other, wouldn't go near each other, like they wouldn't want to stand, you know, in a checkout line at a grocery store with each other, but they have this mutual goal, and they literally can't do it without each other and the discovery of that, the discovery of they see in each other, the cheerleader, the partner, the prodder, the person who sees what's special about them, it's kind of the core of the whole show. K [...]
