Advertisement

Meet Your Maker: The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel creator Amy Sherman-Palladino on her pop culture inspirations

Meet Your Maker: The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel creator Amy Sherman-Palladino on her pop culture inspirations

For Amy Sherman-Palladino, life is a musical comedy.

Or at least, she wishes it was. The creator of Gilmore Girls and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel has earned quite the reputation as a writer of fast-talking, hyper-intelligent women — and for telling unique, hilarious stories of their hopes, dreams, and inner lives. But for the daughter of a comic and a dancer, it all goes back to the Borscht Belt and the golden age of musicals.

"I still go back to my roots," she tells EW. "Which is a couple of Jewish guys sitting out back talking to each other and then cut to Singin' In the Rain. Basically, that's me in a nutshell."

As she prepares to say goodbye to The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which premieres its final season on Prime Video on April 14, Sherman-Palladino is feeling a bit nostalgic, so she agreed to walk us through the pieces of pop culture that have most influenced her work and the ways in which she writes.

<em>The 2000 Year Old Man</em>

This iconic series of sketches, which first premiered on television in 1961, was integral to shaping Sherman-Palladino's sense of humor. "My influences on Gilmore Girls always came from the same places my comedy influences came from, which basically Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, and The 2000 Year Old Man started everything," she says. "My father was a comic, so I grew up around groups of men sitting in the backyard talking quickly and making each other laugh. My comedy came from the rhythm of the Borsch Belt and that Jewish, Yiddish timing, which was Mel Brooks, which was Carl Reiner."

Amy Sherman Palladino Meet Your Maker
Amy Sherman Palladino Meet Your Maker

Barbra Streisand

All you have to do is listen to a random needle drop on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel to understand that Barbra Streisand had a massive influence on Sherman-Palladino and her work. "She means everything to me," the writer says. "She had a lot to do with the way I write women, the way I see women. I see them as funny, unusual, sexy in a way that is not your normal sexy, smart, sharp, fast. She was so unusual as a leading woman because she was funny and strong and different. She was never tragic or a victim. She always had the upper hand no matter what, even if in the situation, she wasn't supposed to."

Amy Sherman Palladino Meet Your Maker
Amy Sherman Palladino Meet Your Maker

The work of Norman Lear

There's no bigger name in television than Norman Lear, who revolutionized television and the sitcom through shows such as All In the Family, Maude, Sanford and Sons, The Jeffersons, The Facts of Life, and more. Sherman-Palladino credits his work with teaching her that humor could be less situational and more dialogue-focused and observational. "I am huge Norman Lear fan," she says. "I loved anything that came out of his world. All In the Family. Forget about it. The best, just absolutely the best. That sort of work with people just talking to each other, and it's not necessarily the situation that was funny. It was the way people looked at life and talked to each other. That was funny."

Amy Sherman Palladino Meet Your Maker
Amy Sherman Palladino Meet Your Maker

Classic musicals

"I was supposed to be a dancer, so my life was lived a little bit more in the world of ballet studios and musical comedy," says Sherman-Palladino. As such, she cites Judy Garland and Fred Astaire in Easter Parade, Astaire and Oscar Levant in The Bandwagon, Gene Kelly in Singin' in the Rain, and other classic Hollywood musicals as major influences. "They have that quick, fast dialogue and humor and constant movement and energy, which is everything that I create because I have no attention span. So, nobody else can have one either," she says with a laugh. "Everyone's going to keep moving and talking and pushing forward. I view everything like a dance. Even sparring and fighting, it's a dance. I view the music in it. Musicals' color and beauty — the color is energy and energy is my motto. Because when people stop and slow down and take a moment, if that high pace stops, then you pay attention. A lot of that really did come from my dance background and my love of musicals."

Amy Sherman Palladino Meet Your Maker
Amy Sherman Palladino Meet Your Maker

<em>Soy Cuba</em> (1964)

Fans of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel will likely already know that the 1964 film Soy Cuba received a moment of direct homage in a season 3 episode. "I always try to turn every scene into a oner," explains Sherman-Palladino (that's one interrupted take/shot, with no cuts). Because of this predilection, camera operator Jim McConkey suggested that the showrunner check out this drama that showcases four vignettes set in and around Havana during the 1959 Cuban revolution. She did — and was immediately obsessed. "You see things there that blow your mind," she says of the film. "Not like now with all the bells and whistles and drones and CGI. You see what they did back before any of that was invented. We felt like it was a perfect opportunity to pay homage to this beautiful, interesting film that has inspired so many people before me. It was one of those wonderful accidents that happens when we work with great people who say, 'Check this out.' Now, I just buy copies and give it to people because they should watch it. If you're interested in cinematography, if you're interested in in camera work, you can't do better than that."

Amy Sherman Palladino Meet Your Maker
Amy Sherman Palladino Meet Your Maker

Bob Fosse (and choreographers)

"I always look at a scene to start with by asking, 'If this was a dance, how would I do this?''' Sherman-Palladino notes. As such, many choreographers, including Bob Fosse, Hermes Pan, and Gene Kelly, have influenced her work, particularly the unique ways in which they choreographed and shot dance on film. "Bob Fosse was one of the first dancers who went into directing and didn't look at it like, 'I'm going to follow you head to toe.' He would lie on the floor and look through a girl's legs and under her chair. He had the feel, he had the energy, the musicality, but he also wanted to go beyond that and lay down and look through the chair."

Amy Sherman Palladino Meet Your Maker
Amy Sherman Palladino Meet Your Maker

Female comics

It's probably a given that the brains behind The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel draws a lot of inspiration from female comics, specifically Elaine May and Joan Rivers. "Elaine May is one of the all-time geniuses, far even beyond her Nichols and May moments," Sherman-Palladino says."The few movies that she directed — I'm even going to say if people could give Ishtar one more look because there's some damn funny s--- in Ishtar. She was absolutely brilliant. Joan Rivers, my God who was better than Joan Rivers? That library card joke Joan Rivers did on Johnny Carson is maybe the best joke I've ever heard in my entire life. It's so smart and it says everything about her, and the world of men and women, in one short, great joke."

Amy Sherman Palladino Meet Your Maker
Amy Sherman Palladino Meet Your Maker

Stephen Sondheim

"Everybody is influenced by Sondheim because he was a wordsmith," reflects Sherman-Palladino. "He really knew how to put story into music and songs. When you look at Gypsy, which is my favorite musical, I think it's perfect. There's not a moment in it that's missed. Those words came from him."

Stephen Sondheim
Stephen Sondheim

<em>Roseanne</em>

Sherman-Palladino's first staff writing job was on Roseannejoining during the show's third season in 1990. She credits the series for shaping her approach to writing women on television. "I was surrounded with people who had to capture a woman's voice — a very specific woman's voice — and a woman's point of view," she explains. "I had Laurie Metcalfe, Sarah Gilbert, just a smorgasbord of really sharp, smart women's voices to cut my teeth on. I'm forever grateful that that was my first job — starting there where the focal point was, What's a woman thinking? What's funny in this scenario being a wife or a mother? Your first job really forms how you look at storytelling, and I had a wonderful executive producer named Bob Myer, who really taught me about structure and story. I came out of that with a very, very strong point of view of how I thought stories should be told, and especially how women should be portrayed and written."

Amy Sherman Palladino Meet Your Maker
Amy Sherman Palladino Meet Your Maker

Related content: