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.
SEASON TWO
This year the WB moved us to Tuesday nights at eight (so long, Friends!), and the ratings began ticking up. I was nominated for a Golden Globe and a SAG Award, and I also got to present at the Emmys. My dates to these events were, in order, my manager, my dad, and my cousin Tim. I was very popular! (With people I worked with and/or was related to.)
Times were different: Christopher gives Lorelai a DVD of The Graduate (no Netflix then) and a disposable camera (these were a HUGE innovation at the time) to take pictures at Rory’s graduation. A classmate of Lorelai’s complains about her job at Kinko’s (ubiquitous copy places before FedEx took over the world). And Lorelai and Rory invite Dean over to watch the TV movie Tears and Laughter: The Joan and Melissa Rivers Story, starring Joan and Melissa Rivers as themselves. (Which reminds me: Joan Rivers was a fellow Barnard alum, and was always so nice and supportive when I saw her on the red carpet. To my knowledge, she always went easy on me, fashion-wise. When I co-wrote a pilot about an aspiring late night talk show host, played by me, I had my character (me) speak to a photo of Joan she keeps on her dressing room mirror. As both a comedian and an inspiration, she is missed.)
Fashion and hair: I mean, I open the season wearing a sleeveless T-shirt with the face of a pug on it. In the second episode, just for variety, I sport a sleeveless T-shirt that gives the illusion that I was also wearing a bunch of pearl necklaces—my fashion evolution this year couldn’t be more evident.
Slip dresses were also very big in 2001, and I wear a lot of them this season. Although am I the only one who’s noticed that slip dresses are basically indistinguishable from plain old slips because they are, in fact, not dresses but just slips? We were all running around in our undergarments feeling fancy-free. They’re back in fashion now, and still no one has blown the lid off this conspiracy to get us to pay more just to wear our underwear in public.
Over the summer I dyed my hair red because it seemed like a fun idea, and then had to dye it back for the show. So this season my hair is black with red undertones, and super-damaged. At some point I did this Japanese straightening treatment that was all the rage then, and my hair turned stick straight and shiny, yet rigid and broom-like.
What I love: Episode 4, “Road Trip to Harvard,” where, in the face of Max and Lorelai’s breakup, Rory and Lorelai bond on the road, and Episode 7, “Like Mother Like Daughter,” where Kelly and I model the same fashions. Also, that diet Michel talks about, where he’s reducing his calories by 30 percent because a study showed it helped rats live longer? It was based on the real-life diet of our producer and health buff Gavin Polone. He is to this day extremely thin, although probably also 30 percent hungrier than the rest of us are.