Long before she ever took on the now-iconic role of Emily Gilmore in Amy Sherman-Palladino’s beloved comedy-drama “Gilmore Girls,” Kelly Bishop had a stunning résumé. From the mid-1960s and on, Bishop appeared in numerous Broadway shows, earning a Tony Award for her performance as Sheila in the first iteration of “A Chorus Line.” In the ’80s, she appeared as Frances “Baby” Houseman’s mother in “Dirty Dancing” and in subsequent years lit up daytime television on “One Life to Live” and “All My Children.”
For all her career highs, however, Bishop likely will remain best known for her cutting and complex performance as the moneyed New England matriarch in “Gilmore Girls” from 2000 to 2007 — a period she chronicles beautifully in her new memoir, “The Third Gilmore Girl.”
In candid and down-to-earth prose, Bishop, 80, looks back at her early years as a trained ballet dancer, moving to New York and entering the Broadway scene (then under her birth name Carole Bishop), auditioning for Woody Allen’s one-act play “Central Park West,” transitioning to film in Paul Mazursky’s 1978 Oscar-nominated drama “An Unmarried Woman” and meeting Sherman-Palladino, with whom she continued to work on “Bunheads” and “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”
“There was no pretense about [Sherman-Palladino], no slickness, no political glad-handing or equivocating,” Bishop writes in her book. “Just a woman who knew the value of her work and the quality of her project and was crystal clear on how it should be done.”
Here are a few more “Gilmore”-themed revelations from Bishop’s memoir — out now.
Sorry, Jess and Dean fans — Bishop is Team Logan
For as long as “Gilmore Girls” has been a part of the cultural conversation, viewers have been split over which of Rory Gilmore’s (Alexis Bledel) beaus was the best — an argument that extended into Netflix’s 2016 “Gilmore Girls” revival. Typically, the fight boils down to Team Jess (Milo Ventimiglia), an emotionally avoidant but well-read “bad boy” who becomes a self-actualized published author, and Logan Huntzberger (Matt Czuchry), Rory’s classmate at Yale who is being groomed to take over the family publishing empire. Then there’s Dean (Jared Padalecki), Rory’s first boyfriend, who is kind, stable and communicative but periodically acts threatened by Rory’s Ivy League aspirations. Not to mention he cheats on his wife with Rory.
“I was always Team Logan,” Bishop writes in her memoir. “All the young actors on ‘Gilmore Girls’ were terrific, on- and off-screen, but while several of them seemed boyish, Logan took a more manly approach that I thought worked perfectly as a partner for Rory.”
As for Lorelai’s romance arc, Bishop is Team Luke
Fans also have squabbled over the question of which love interest was best for Lorelai Gilmore (Lauren Graham), who started the series dating one of Rory’s prep school teachers, Max Medina (Scott Cohen). Later, she pinballs between Rory’s unreliable yet charming father, Christopher (David Sutcliffe), and Luke (Scott Patterson), the local diner owner with a gruff exterior and unextinguishable torch for Lorelai.
“I was definitely Team Luke,” Bishop says. “It wasn’t just that Luke genuinely loved her. He also understood that he was dealing with a very quirky, specific woman, and he ‘got’ her. I loved watching them together.”
Bishop’s favorite Emily insult was aimed at Logan’s mom
One of Emily’s defining characteristics was her seemingly endless supply of scathing insults. Though the bulk of Emily’s barbs were reserved for her mother-in-law, husband and daughter, in the Season 6 episode “We’ve Got Magic to Do,” she unleashed in grand fashion on Logan’s mother, Shira (Leann Hunley), upon learning that the Huntzbergers told Rory she wasn’t “properly bred” to date Logan.
Bishop writes: “I kept a smile on Emily’s face so that, from a distance, it could have appeared that she was complimenting Shira on her dress and asking who designed it, while she was actually delivering lines like, ‘You were a two-bit gold digger fresh off the bus from Hicksville when you met [Logan’s father] Mitchum at whatever bar you stumbled into. … Now, enjoy the event.’
“It was an absolute masterpiece by Amy and a joy to deliver, not only because it was Emily at her force-of-nature best but also because it was another display of her fierce love for her granddaughter.”
Bishop didn’t like the final season of ‘Gilmore Girls’
Very few “Gilmore Girls” fans think highly of its seventh and final season, which ran from 2006 to 2007. Due to a breakdown in contract negotiations, Amy and husband/co-writer/producer Dan Palladino exited the show after Season 6. Though Warner Bros. brought in a new writing team, Bishop recalls that “Gilmore Girls” “seemed to get kind of sleepy and tired from one week to the next, as if the air was being slowly let out of a big, sparkly balloon, and we could sense that the party might be ending, even though no one wanted to say it out loud.”
Bishop also says, “To the best of my knowledge, Amy still hasn’t watched a single episode of [Season 7].”
She did, however, love Netflix’s divisive ‘A Year in the Life’
When “Gilmore Girls” hit Netflix in 2014, it experienced an extraordinary bump in popularity. “Not only did its original viewers jump right in to enjoy it all over again, but whole new generations were introduced to it and fell in love with it too,” Bishop recalls.
The renewed interest led to a 15-year reunion panel at the ATX TV Festival in 2015 and, one year later, a Netflix revival. Though the four-episode “A Year in the Life” brought the Palladinos back, reception was decidedly mixed. Critics overall favored the miniseries, but fans “were frustrated by the loose ends they felt they were left with,” as Bishop writes.
One of those loose ends was Rory’s infamous “last four words” to Lorelai: “Mom?” “Yeah?” “I’m pregnant.” Cut to black.
“Those mysterious ‘last four words’ … struck me as more interesting than infuriating, since it opened debates among viewers to decide who Rory was pregnant by, and what the repercussions would be. I personally think it was Logan, by the way.”
