Amy Sherman-Palladino Dishes on ‘Gilmore Girls,’ ‘Maisel’ at PaleyFest

It’s Amy Sherman-Palladino’s world and we’re all just watching it.

Or at least that was the premise of the PaleyFest L.A. panel that looked back on the prolific TV creator’s hit shows, “Gilmore Girls” and “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” and previewed her new ballet comedy “Étoile.”

Sherman-Palladino was greeted by a roar of applause and a standing ovation from fans who packed the Dolby Theater in Hollywood on Saturday. She smiled and waved as she strode across the stage, seeming truly delighted to have all her actors assemble like the Avengers. But she found it a little tough to focus on the momentousness of the occasion.

“Sorry, I spent the whole red carpet staring at Lauren’s ass and Rachel’s tits. People kept talking about lines that meant something to me,” Sherman-Palladino quipped as she settled into her seat on the “multiverse” panel, sandwiched between “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s” Luke Kirby (who also stars in “Étoile”); Alex Borstein and Rachel Brosnahan; “Gilmore Girls” mother-daughter duo Kelly Bishop and Lauren Graham; “Étoile” leads Charlotte Gainsbourg and Lou de Laâge; and her husband, fellow TV icon Daniel Palladino.

The 90-minute conversation, moderated by Stacey Wilson Hunt, traced Sherman-Palladino’s career chronologically — beginning with a fateful decision to skip a callback for “Cats” in favor of taking a writing gig on “Roseanne.”

“I wasn’t supposed to be here. I was supposed to be a dancer,” Sherman-Palladino said, explaining that she’d been trained as a ballerina from the age of 4 or 5. “Sorry, Mom.” (Her mother, Maybin Hewes, was in the audience and yelled out what she told her daughter at the time: “I hope this pays off.”)

Did it ever! The “Roseanne” gig not only opened the door to a successful TV career, but her writing partner also introduced her to Palladino on a blind lunch date, and the rest is history.

“I do believe the first thing I ever heard Amy say, besides ‘Hello,’ was, ‘I’m in hell!’ And I thought, ‘That’s the girl for me,’” he recalled. “It was done.”

The pair didn’t write together early on — they were a “non-power couple,” Sherman-Palladino joked — but by the late ’90s, Palladino was making a stable living writing on “Family Guy” and encouraged her to take the pressure off and write whatever she wanted to write. “She ended up writing ‘Gilmore Girls,’” he shared.

The comedy, starring Graham as Lorelai Gilmore, a 32-year-old single mom raising her teenage daughter Rory (Alexis Bledel), aired on the WB from 2000-2007. But the road to cult classic status was a bit bumpy at first.

The first hurdle was getting Graham on board. She loved the script, but she was locked into another show on NBC. To make matters worse, Sherman-Palladino refused to see her until she was available. “I didn’t want to fall in love with you,” she explained.

Eventually, the casting team wore her down, and Graham came in to read. “She walked in and after the first line, I was like ‘Goddammit!’ and then I had to pray that someone else’s show was going to get canceled.” (Graham said that a WB exec later, drunkenly, told her that they “traded” her for another actor that NBC wanted.)

While the show became a flagship series for the WB — and has gone on to have 500 million hours viewed on Netflix on top of its previous syndication deal — the studio didn’t initially exhibit much confidence. While in the early stages of production, Sherman-Palladino would get a call from the studio once a week from an exec saying, “The network is upset. They’re disappointed in you and the work you’re doing.”

This went on throughout the shoot, until, one day, Sherman-Palladino had had enough. “I go, ‘I know: You’re upset; you’re disappointed. Listen, you’re not my mother. Only my mother can be upset and disappointed,’” she said, then launched into an ultimatum. “You’re the boss. It’s your show. You can fire me. I can pack up my stuff. … Or you can not call me again. I don’t know why they didn’t fire me. They didn’t call me again. The pilot aired. They sent me flowers.”

It might not have been the smartest move, but it worked. And there were other ways she navigated around the suits, too.

“I remember scripts not really coming in with enough time [for notes],” Graham said. Sherman-Palladino would finish the pages at night, and the cast would get them in the makeup trailer in the morning. “So, they weren’t even up.”

The relationship was tricky because “Gilmore Girls” didn’t fit the mold of the other WB shows.

“It was not a teen soap — which they specialized in,” Sherman-Palladino recalled. “It wasn’t genre, so it wasn’t ‘Buffy.’ There were a lot of notes about, ‘Why isn’t Rory having sex?’ Because she’s in fucking high school and not everyone blows someone in a bathroom. There were weird pushback things like ‘Why isn’t Lorelai being more of a mom?’ I’m like, ‘Because that’s not what the show is.’”

Things were quite different with “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” — the comedy about a 1950s housewife turned successful stand-up comedian (Brosnahan) and her equally audacious manager (Borstein) — where Sherman-Palladino and Palladino had the keys to the castle.

“Gilmore Girls” has a bare-bones budget — “‘Drew Carey’ would send us their water and leftover paint, which is why I’d walk Lauren in a circle in Burbank endlessly because we couldn’t go anywhere,” she cracked — but on “Maisel,” she and Palladino had the cash and the crew to pull off their vision. It was a top-notch team, who had worked on “The Sopranos” and “Boardwalk Empire” — and fortunately for her, their latest show, “Vinyl,” was unexpectedly canceled at the last minute.

“So, I have a whole crew of great people with no work, and like the angel of death, I just swept in and got them all,” Sherman-Palladino joked. “For the first time, we had everything that we needed: we had the cast, we had the crew, we had the cash and it was like, ‘The only people who can fuck that up now is us.’”

Spoiler alert: they didn’t. “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” ran for five seasons and won 22 Emmys, including trophies for the lead trio (Brosnahan won for lead actress in a comedy; Borstein notched two wins in the supporting actress category; and Kirby won for guest actor), among nearly 300 various award nominations.

For her next act, Sherman-Palladino returns to the ballet barre with “Étoile,” which debuts April 24 on Prime Video. It’s her second ballet-centric show after “Bunheads,” which aired on ABC Family in 2012. (That series got a shoutout during the panel, too, with a video message from star Sutton Foster and some sweet revelations from Bishop, who also trained to be a ballerina.)

Asked how her ballet background affects her writing, Sherman-Palladino said it influenced her rhythm, but impacts her most when she directs. “Directing is where the pace, the energy, the motion is like choreography,” she explained.

“Part of my brazenness, my schmuckiness — depending on whether you’re working at the network or you’re on the other side — comes from the fact that I had no concept of ‘I want to be rich. I want money. I want fame. I want to be successful.’ I came from a world where you worked for the work … because no one makes a dime in dance,” she said, comparing the two vocations. “Part of the reason I’m a pain in the ass is because [the story is] my sole focus.”

With “Étoile,” the dance drama takes an international turn. Kirby returns to play the director of a struggling New York City ballet company, while French legend Gainsbourg plays his counterpart in Paris, who suggests they exchange principal dancers in a stunt to save both ballets. De Laâge delivers a tour de force performance as Cheyenne, the prima ballerina who begrudgingly transfers from Paris to New York.

“It was very magical experience, and doing comedy is a different language is very humbling,” Sherman-Palladino said. “I’ve been very blessed. The women who have walked into my life, I’m absolutely not a good enough person to deserve this.”

When the conversation turned to questions from the audience, one fan asked how Sherman-Palladino’s process differs from project to project, so she shared some sage advice: “Your process is your processes, but the actors are different.”

Picking up on people’s rhythms is a skill she learned from working with Graham on “Gilmore Girls”: “If you learn to create for people, your process is automatically going to change, because they are not interchangeable. You cannot approach any actor of any merit — they’re not a plant. They have their own world of intelligence and thought, and the way they do things, and if you don’t service them, it doesn’t matter how good a script is, nobody’s going to see it, like it or care about it. Everything on the page has to come to life with the people you’re handing it to.”

To conclude the conversation, Hunt asked Sherman-Palladino whether she’s able to take in all that she’s accomplished.

“No,” she replied quickly, as the audience burst into laughter one last time. “That’s what you do when you’re dead.”

But her attempt to deflect the sentimental question with a joke proved futile as a touch of tenderness overtook her. “This was wonderful,” Sherman-Palladino added. “You got my favorite people together in one room, and I miss them every day I’m not with them.”