Turns Out Gilmore Girls Wasn’t All Coffee and Coziness

Gilmore Girls is marking its 25th anniversary this year, and watching the show is still like wrapping yourself in a warm, cozy blanket. But while the sweet world of Stars Hollow and its kooky cast of characters may always feel effortless to us, it was anything but relaxed behind the scenes.

The show’s creator, Amy Sherman-Palladino, says that Gilmore Girls’ signature rapid-fire rhythm of fast dialogue, overlapping chatter, and long takes not only required a lot of effort but also created a high-stress environment for everyone involved.

“We were all in a panic constantly, so there was no cozy vibe at all,” she recalled in a recent interview with THR. “It was very frantic. We were shooting 80 pages in eight days, so 10 pages a day with no hiatuses and no breaks, and we were doing 22 episodes. I don’t know how we did it.” 

With limited time and budget, every scene had to count. “We had so little time and so little money that by Christmas, when I think we would get a week off, Lauren and Alexis’ eyes were so huge for lack of sleep and from the constant workload that I kind of thought they were going to kill me,” she admitted.

The challenge of making Gilmore Girls was compounded by the series’ distinctive style, leaving no room for error. 

“We were doing a different kind of show with a massive amount of dialogue, with a massive amount of walk and talks without coverage, and it was just hard. We were not a show that could go back and reshoot anything. If we didn’t get it, we didn’t get it. There was no fixing it later. If the sun was going down on one location day and we didn’t have work in the camera, we weren’t getting the work in the camera. It was just the kind of show it was, very high stress all the time.”

Luckily, at the center of this whirlwind was Lauren Graham, whose central performance as Lorelai Gilmore required an enormous amount of stamina. “Lauren would come in to block a scene at 7 in the morning, go to the makeup trailer, and she didn’t know her dialogue for the day; and she would learn 10 pages of dialogue in the time she had hair done. I don’t know how she did it. I don’t think she’s human because that’s impossible.”

Despite this chaos, Gilmore Girls eventually emerged as one of TV’s most beloved dramedies, one that we’re still revisiting 25 years later.