The "Gilmore Girls" revival has begun and Stars Hollow is up and running again on the Warner Bros. lot. The cast started filming on Monday following its first table read on Friday, the same day Netflix confirmed news of the revival.
"Gilmore Girls" creator Amy Sherman-Palladino is back with her husband and writer/producer partner Daniel Palladino to give the show the proper finale not afforded to them when they left the show early and they will do it with their four main cast members Lauren Graham (Lorelai Gilmore), Alexis Bledel (Rory Gilmore), Scott Patterson (Luke Danes) and Kelly Bishop (Emily Gilmore).
Moving from The WB to The CW in 2006, the show ran for a seventh and final season under a new showrunner. Despite the creators' absence that last season, the revival will recognize those storylines.
"We weren't going to take something and do it even though Season 7 negated it. That wasn't going to happen. I wasn't going to say to the fans who stayed through Season 7, "Hey, you all wasted your f-ing time for a whole season. So, ignore all that!" We had to pick them up where they left off," Sherman-Palladino told TVLine.
OY with the poodles, already! See you on set, Amy Sherman-Palladino, @thelaurengraham @alexisbledel. #GilmoreGirls pic.twitter.com/kM36J1JVgV
— Netflix US (@netflix) January 29, 2016
The "Gilmore Girls" revival series, tentatively titled "Gilmore Girls: Seasons," will pick up eight years after the show ended and consist of four 90-minute episodes, each taking placing during a calendar season. The scripts are titled "Winter," "Spring," "Summer" and "Fall," a nod to the song "You've Got a Friend" written by Carole King whose song "Where You Lead" was the show's theme song.
"Narratively, it really worked. It worked to open on snow and have a colder, starker environment. And then end on a lusher, warmer, golden-y town, which lends to where the story will end," Sherman-Palladino told TVLine.
The cold and stark environment will have as much to do with the weather as the recent loss in the Gilmore family both on and off screen. The Gilmore women have lost their family patriarch Richard Gilmore, played by the late Edward Herrmann, who passed away in late 2014. Richard's death will cause his family to reexamine their lives after such a traumatic loss and leave his widowed wife Emily "a little manic."
"She's kind of a raw nerve. In a desperate attempt to push through [her grief], she blows between right on the edge of losing it to almost being a little manic," Bishop told TVLine. "[Richard] is certainly a presence, especially in that first script. And Ed's probably going to be hovering around the set a bit and watching over us. I really do believe that. Because he really loved the show."
- The "Gilmore Girls" creators began working on the revival in May 2015 and first pitched it to Warner Bros. TV (the studio that produced the original series) in June 2015, around the same time the cast reunited at the ATX Television Festival and Sherman-Palladino denied any plans to reboot the show.
- Sutton Foster, who starred in Sherman-Palladino's show "Bunheads" on ABC Family, will guest star in the revival. It will reunite her with "Bunheads" co-stars Bishop, Weil and Gunn.
- "Gilmore Girls" composer Sam Phillips also confirmed her return to "sing some more la la's" via Facebook.
- Don't expect anyone to drop an F-bomb even though the show is airing on Netflix. Sherman-Palladino told TVLine, "We've [written] a couple of lines where we've thrown [curses] in and it's sort of... just feels weird. We're just trying to find that right balance."
