People have been noticing the similarities between Twin Peaks’ eccentric small town and Gilmore Girls’ Stars Hollow for years. There’s the shared cast (Sherilyn Fenn and Mädchen Amick, in Gilmore’s original run, with Ray Wise joining later in the revival). There’s the direct callouts to David Lynch’s work (now a TikTok audio fave). And there’s of course the love of coffee, pie, and spending a lot of time in the town diner.
This is not purely by accident.
“There’s nothing of David Lynch’s that I’ve seen — even stuff that I’m kind of like, Well, I don’t know what the fuck that was — you never walk away feeling like, Well, I wasted those two hours I’ll never get back. You were in for something,” Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino tells Polygon. She, like her husband and fellow Gilmore Girls co-executive producer Daniel Palladino and many other writers, felt the electricity of David Lynch and Mark Frost’s procedural send a shock through the system of television.
“It just hit me at the right moment in my life, in my growing as a writer — it landed, in a way. It was so impactful. You stumble across things in a certain time in your life, and they will always mean the most to you because it was when you were the most open to being affected by it. […] That’s what the first Twin Peaks did for me.”
In honor of the first Twin Peaks Day without David Lynch, the Sherman-Palladinos sat down with Polygon to talk through how the little northwest community of Twin Peaks influenced the Connecticut hamlet of Stars Hollow, and what they learned from David Lynch when making Gilmore Girls.
[Ed. note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.]
Tell me when you fell in love with David Lynch’s work, either as your first foray into it, or the first thing that really hit you, like, Holy shit.
Amy Sherman-Palladino: Well, Dan, you probably knew about David Lynch before I did.
Daniel Palladino: Yeah — I forget what order these movies came out, but Elephant Man and Blue Velvet; I love both of them. And then I was working at ABC, actually, when Twin Peaks came out, and a lot of us writers loved it. And we were already hearing from the executives that they didn’t know what the hell it is, but they put it on. It became this phenomenon, but they didn’t understand it, which is very common in the TV business. But definitely, definitely Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, Elephant Man were the ones.
And he was just a cool — I even started buttoning the top button on my shirts, on my long-sleeve shirts, because David Lynch did it.
Sherman-Palladino: That’s really weird. Seriously. I don’t even want to know that.
Palladino: I get the sense he might’ve had tailored shirts and I didn’t.
Sherman-Palladino: I was on Roseanne, and I bought [The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer] and drove up to a murder hotel and stayed there for two days reading Laura Palmer’s diary over the weekend — which made me feel extremely young, because all the rest of the guys on staff were quite horrified actually by the concept of going to a seedy hotel and reading Laura Palmer’s diary.
But it was the first time that I think I realized that television could have a mood, and could have style to it. Because TV was very flat, even though there was good TV! There were good TV shows on. It was flat — it was a flat style, it was very formulaic. There was nothing that was terribly, terribly surprising. It was just like: Is this a good cop show or a bad cop show? And the whole idea of introducing music, and lighting, and weird characters, and a location that was as much a part of the show as anything else — because TV wasn’t about location then. It was about backlots. That’s one thing that when I did Gilmore Girls — on a really much smaller scale, because we had $4 to do Gilmore Girls — but it was the thing that stuck.
What were you seeing in Twin Peaks that you wanted to build off and take into your own work?
Sherman-Palladino: Well, it was giving your show a sense of place. It turned out to be sort of the secret weapon of Gilmore Girls, even though at the time, the studio and the network were not at all that interested in sense of place. For them it was like: You’ve got two pretty girls and they walk in a circle and they talk to each other. That’s all we care about.
It was the town — that sense of where Lorelei took Rory to be raised, and what that town was, and the seasons and the feel of the place that she wanted to live — that I think actually set Gilmore Girls apart, as much as anything else, because it had a place that you longed to live in. And I think that in much different ways, when you watch Twin Peaks or really any David Lynch [project], the sense of place was so strong, you felt it. And you wanted to either visit there, or if you ran across a creepy place in your life, you’re like, This is very David Lynchian and I’d like to get out of here. I’m going to get murdered here.
So that sort of sense of place I think is something that directly affected Gilmore Girls, a hundred percent. It was fighting for being able to create a world that was not just: And they’re outside! The less homicidal version of Twin Peaks was Stars Hollow. The characters were a little bent, a little off. Everybody was very intertwined; their fates were intertwined. Music was heavily important to Gilmore Girls. What the music was, what the music said, where the music was placed, who was playing it. The Troubadour was a less scary Julee Cruise in Stars Hollow.
And then we used, like… a bunch of his actors. [laughs] He just had that eye for someone that was odd; she was beautiful, but sort of weird. His eye for that sort of thing was just perfect. And it made you think about casting differently. It made you think about music, it made you think about sets differently and where you placed scenes. It just got in your brain.
Going beyond the callouts and the actor crossover, you’ve also got Lesli Linka Glatter, who’s your pilot director. I’m curious how you worked with her to set the town apart right away, and if you had Twin Peaks on the brain when you were working with her.
Palladino: Did Lesli direct episodes of Twin Peaks?
Sherman-Palladino: We had no idea.
Oh wow! Yeah, she directed stuff like “Cooper’s Dreams.”
Sherman-Palladino: Oh, she’s cool. Yeah, I wanted Lesli because she was a dancer. She came from the dance world, and Gilmore is a very rhythmic piece, and it felt like it needed somebody from that world. And in our experience, our most successful directors have always been — through Gilmore, through Maisel — have always been dancers, because they come with that engine, that sort of rhythmic sensibility built in. So the dialogue is second nature to them. But that’s why we went with Lesli. But now—
Palladino: Now we love her even more!
Sherman-Palladino: Yeah, she’s even cooler to us.
I thought it was such a good choice, given that she’d directed on Twin Peaks and had Now and Then [a heartfelt, cross-generational film], which seemed perfect for what I’d have in mind for Gilmore Girls as a concept.
Sherman-Palladino: We’re always very specific; we rarely have three different people we want for any part. It’s always: There’s one actor that’s right, there’s one director that’s right. Maybe we just have short attention spans and once we find something we don’t want to think about it anymore; that could possibly be it.
I don’t know that I set out to say this is going to be non-murdery Twin Peaks, but it just, [Lynch’s] sensibility and the importance that he plays as an artist in all of his movies, on mood, on music, on casting, on location, it was so important and it stayed with you. And I think that that just sort of seeps into your brain. So when you get a chance to do it yourself, you kind of know — even though the studio and the network is saying, Well, no one cares about the town. They only care that there’s two pretty girls talking to each other — you kind of know that’s not true, that’s shortsighted. Because the reason that people are still talking about Twin Peaks or Blue Velvet [is] because you see those images, you feel the wood, you smell the coffee, and you taste the cherry pie. It’s such a strong impression that if that can leave that sort of impression on you, you want to be able to have your work leave that impression on somebody else.
Twin Peaks feels like one of those shows that was sold as one thing but is smuggling in so much. Obviously there are a lot of shows that are more directly “Lynchian” or Twin Peaks-y, but I think it’s one of those shows that’s influential because of the ways it’s so many things and can point to its influence in almost any show that came after. In many ways it’s clearly designed off of a soap pattern or something!
Sherman-Palladino: I often wonder how they sold it. They probably said, “Well, high school girl gets murdered — it’s a murder mystery.” Like, how do you sell Twin Peaks? Because it’s so not a murder mystery; that was not at all what the show was. But that’s probably what the network heard. Like, Oh, a murder mystery; like Jessica Fletcher, right? That’s a murder mystery.
Palladino: I think to me, the ultimate influence of something like Twin Peaks is: The ones that are probably least successful [are] the ones who tried consciously to be Twin Peaks. But I think that the sort of auxiliary influence that it had is in a lot of stuff. Everyone’s heard of Twin Peaks. Everyone kind of knows what Twin Peaks is. And I just think because it was so unusual at the time, it just sort of entered the grammar and the DNA of writers, even if they didn’t really know it. I know a lot have tried to do it over the years, and they’ve been very, very unsuccessful. And you can tell…
Sherman-Palladino: It also gave writers a lot of false hope—
Palladino: [laughs] Any hope is false to us.
Sherman-Palladino: That you could do something original and special and they would acknowledge it, and let it thrive. And I think we coasted on that for many years before we realized that [laughs] it was just David Lynch that got it through. So thanks for that, David.
I mean, I see a lot of that same Trojan Horsing in Gilmore Girls, with regard to characters and a lot of the feelings, themes, and relationships that are knotty and complicated and refuse to settle into one thing or another. Where’d you get that kind of specifically TV plotting for building out those relationships?
Sherman-Palladino: Well, we were always very stingy — and I don’t know if it was Twin Peaks, necessarily. What Twin Peaks really gave you is the idea of: Don’t just assume you know where something’s going to go. Because that’s an easy thing to fall into. And at the time that we were doing Gilmore Girls, we were on a very specific network, that they were very young people [focused] — Dawson’s Creek, Buffy, Smallville — and Gilmore Girls was just stingier with plot. I think that we just trusted that the characters were interesting in themselves, and the more that you got to know them and live in their world, the more you were connected to them.
And Twin Peaks was a lot like that. You loved those characters. And after a while, it was almost like it kind of didn’t even matter who killed Laura Palmer. It just didn’t matter! And I was reading something recently, some little oral [history] that the network was saying to Frost and David Lynch, “Just tell us who killed Laura Palmer already!” But that’s not the point. That was just the catalyst to get us into this world and to meet all these people, and to find out there’s so many other weird things going on here that have nothing to do with Laura Palmer. But also, the minute that we told people, that we tried to tie it up and say, “Here’s who killed Laura Palmer” — it was kind of over; the fun was over.
And we sort of felt that same way a little bit in Gilmore Girls, but just not so specifically. We never had one overarching storyline like that. But we did feel like the journey is the journey of the lives of these people. And if you love them, and if you’re invested in them, you didn’t need the specific, And then they show up, and then they get stuck in an elevator, and then they find out one of them is actually related to the other person. You didn’t need so much crazy story, because life is enough.
I was also very lucky, because my first job was Roseanne, and that was very much weirdly storywise stressed on Roseanne, which was: Make the small big, make the big small. And I think that, whether or not David Lynch would say he would look at story, it felt like that was the way he would look at story. It was the small things that he wanted to look into and amplify — and especially in Twin Peaks, the big thing was the least important or interesting moment. It’s not the moment that they suddenly said it was Bob or whatever. It was the funeral; it was those other moments that stick in your mind of how the characters were reacting to the tragedy that was there, and how it affected their own lives and relationships. That was the fun of Twin Peaks. And I think that they sort of knew, like, Well, let’s not bring this to a head, because what’s the fun of that? Let’s just live here awhile.
Source：https://www.polygon.com/tv/527942/twin-peaks-gilmore-girls-influence-connection-palladinos-interview
