Amy Sherman-Palladino (Stephen Shugerman)
FRESH START: Kaitlyn Jenkins stars in Amy Sherman-Palladino’s (inset) new series on ABC Family. (
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Amy Sherman-Palladino, the brains behind “Gilmore Girls,” isn’t trying to recreate “Gilmore” — or any other cult-hit show with her new series, “Bunheads.”
“They wanted something like ‘Glee,’ ” she recalled of a lunch with Kate Juergens, an executive at ABC Family. “I said: ‘Glee’ is great, but I don’t want to do ‘Glee’ because there is ‘Glee.’ ”
But Sherman-Palladino was already working on a play about four girls in a dance class. ABC Family was looking to build a show around the Tony Award-winning actress Sutton Foster. The two projects came together in the new series “Bunheads” — in which Foster plays a down-on-her-luck, Vegas-showgirl-turned-dancer, Michelle, who moves with her new husband from Nevada to a town called Paradise, Calif., and finds work at his mother’s ballet school.
Michelle, Sherman-Palladino says, “is not a motherly type; she’s not Lorelai,” but she may be able to find salvation from her own bad choices at the dance studio.
It’s fertile ground for Sherman-Palladino, a onetime bunhead herself, who worked as a writer on “Roseanne,” among other shows, in the ’90s before creating “Gilmore” in 2000.
That show, featuring a young single mother (Lorelai) and her teenage daughter, Rory, in a Connecticut town, aired on the WB and CW networks until 2007.
“Gilmore” fans loved the machine-gun dialogue and topsy-turvy family dynamics — sometimes mother and daughter seemed like sisters, sometimes their roles seemed reversed.
Comparisons between “Gilmore” and “Bunheads” — which also share an occasional director, Kenny Ortega, and actress Kelly Bishop — are inevitable, Sherman-Palladino says.
“Stylistically, I write a certain way . . . I like shooting a certain way, I like space, I like air, I like movement, and I like the quirky side of people,” she said. “It’s going to have a ‘Gilmore’ kind of feel and bounce to it, but it’s not ‘Gilmore.’ ”
“Bunheads,” which premieres Monday, is the latest in what seems like a troupe of new dance shows, from “Breaking Pointe,” which goes behind the scenes of the Salt Lake City Ballet Company, to “Dance Moms,” an often outrageous reality show centered on dance teacher Abby Lee Miller and the world of children’s competitive dancing.
But Sutton Foster is not Abby Lee Miller.
“I don’t really consider this a dance show,” Sherman-Palladino says, adding: “I enjoy ‘Dance Moms,’ [but] I think it’s horrifying.
“The backdrop is dance because it gave me sort of a lovely, fun place to make the center of the universe — the ballet school. And it allows me to do dances, which are always fun,” she says.
And for the character of Michelle, dance provides a ticking clock, and a source of tension.
“There’s a natural end to when you’re going to be a dancer, and it’s not when you’re 90. It gave me a great dramatic jumping-off point,” she said.