{"id":1132457,"date":"2026-02-03T14:35:56","date_gmt":"2026-02-03T14:35:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.polygon.com\/?p=527942"},"modified":"2026-02-03T14:35:56","modified_gmt":"2026-02-03T14:35:56","slug":"lets-just-live-here-awhile-the-sherman-palladinos-on-gilmore-girls-twin-peaks-reference","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arcader.org\/news\/lets-just-live-here-awhile-the-sherman-palladinos-on-gilmore-girls-twin-peaks-reference\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Let\u2019s just live here awhile\u2019: The Sherman-Palladinos on Gilmore Girls\u2019 Twin Peaks reference"},"content":{"rendered":"
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People have been noticing the similarities between Twin Peaks<\/a><\/em>\u2019 eccentric small town and Gilmore Girls<\/a><\/em>\u2019 Stars Hollow for years. There\u2019s the shared cast (Sherilyn Fenn and M\u00e4dchen Amick, in Gilmore<\/em>\u2019s original run, with Ray Wise joining later in the revival). There\u2019s the direct callouts to David Lynch\u2019s work (now a TikTok audio fave<\/a>). And there\u2019s of course the love of coffee, pie, and spending a lot of time in the town diner.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This is not purely<\/em> by accident.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere’s nothing of David Lynch’s that I’ve seen \u2014 even stuff that I’m kind of like, Well, I don’t know what the fuck that was \u2014<\/em> you never walk away feeling like, Well, I wasted those two hours I’ll never get back<\/em>. You were in for something,\u201d Gilmore Girls<\/em> creator Amy Sherman-Palladino tells Polygon. She, like her husband and fellow Gilmore Girls<\/em> co-executive producer Daniel Palladino and many other writers, felt the electricity of David Lynch and Mark Frost\u2019s procedural send a shock through the system of television. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt just hit me at the right moment in my life, in my growing as a writer \u2014 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. [\u2026] That’s what the first Twin Peaks<\/em> did for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

In honor of the first Twin Peaks Day<\/a> without David Lynch<\/a>, 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<\/em>. <\/p>\n

[Ed. note: <\/strong>This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.]<\/p>\n

Tell me when you fell in love with David Lynch\u2019s work, either as your first foray into it, or the first thing that really hit you, like, <\/strong>Holy shit<\/em><\/strong>. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Amy Sherman-Palladino:<\/strong> Well, Dan, you probably knew about David Lynch before I did. <\/p>\n

Daniel Palladino: <\/strong>Yeah \u2014 I forget what order these movies came out, but Elephant Man<\/em> and Blue Velvet<\/em>; I love both of them. And then I was working at ABC, actually, when Twin Peaks<\/em> 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<\/em>, Blue Velvet<\/em>, Elephant Man<\/em> were the ones.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And he was just a cool \u2014 I even started buttoning the top button on my shirts, on my long-sleeve shirts, because David Lynch did it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sherman-Palladino: <\/strong>That’s really weird. Seriously. I don’t even want to know that. <\/p>\n

Palladino: <\/strong>I get the sense he might’ve had tailored shirts and I didn’t.<\/p>\n

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Sherman-Palladino: <\/strong>I was on Roseanne<\/em>, and I bought [The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer<\/em>] and drove up to a murder hotel and stayed there for two days reading Laura Palmer’s diary over the weekend \u2014 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 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 \u2014 because TV wasn’t about location then. It was about backlots. That’s one thing that when I did Gilmore Girls \u2014<\/em> on a really<\/em> much smaller scale, because we had $4 to do Gilmore Girls<\/em> \u2014 but it was the thing that stuck.<\/p>\n

What were you seeing in <\/strong>Twin Peaks<\/em><\/strong> that you wanted to build off and take into your own work? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Sherman-Palladino: <\/strong>Well, it was giving your show a sense of place. It turned out to be sort of the secret weapon of Gilmore Girls<\/em>, 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.<\/em> <\/p>\n

It was the town \u2014 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 \u2014 that I think actually set Gilmore Girls<\/em> 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<\/em> 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.<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n

So that sort of sense of place I think is something that directly affected Gilmore Girls<\/em>, a hundred percent. It was fighting for being able to create a world that was not just: And they’re outside! <\/em>The less homicidal version of Twin Peaks<\/em> 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<\/em>. 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And then we used, like\u2026 a bunch of his actors. [laughs<\/em>] 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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