Taking a break from the music coverage on this blog, I want to talk about my experience at the ATX TV Festival. This is a festival I had been hearing about since it started in 2012. I thought, what a great idea for an event, treating TV like a film festival and bringing fans, stars and showrunners together. There are a few shows I have loved in my life, but there is one that I love more than all and that’s Gilmore Girls. This show about mother-daughter relationships set in the tiny Connecticut hamlet of Stars Hollow is well written, supremely acted and hilariously funny, filled with a range of pop-culture references. Many of its stars have gone on to greatness. So, when I heard that there would a reunion of the stars and producers of the show, I was all in. I purchased a weekend badge and fought through their fast pass system on the day it was live. Luckily I got most of my choices for fast pass and was able to have a wonderful weekend.
The GG reunion took this festival to the next level. Badge sales tripled. Gilmore fans are very loyal and passionate and have been dying for something from this show since it signed off eight years ago. So, this young event had some growing pains, long lines, disappointed fans, but overall it was a fantastic conference. I can tell that the organizers will want to improve going forward.
Before the reunion panel, I got to see some amazing talks. The first was the panel for Bunheads, which was produced by the same person as Gilmore Girls, the great Amy Sherman-Palladino. It stars Sutton Foster, who is a beautiful and talented actress, as well as Kelly Bishop, who played Emily Gilmore in Gilmore Girls. Bunheads was about another small town, this one in California, where a former Vegas showgirl ends up teaching a group of young ballerinas. It had one season, and sadly it was gone. It was another beautifully written show about relationships. I loved the show, so I naturally loved seeing the people behind it talk about it. Sherman-Palladino is brilliant and wickedly funny. It was a great kickoff, and I started out meeting lovely folks in line and in the theater (always nice to spend a couple hours in an Alamo Drafthouse). A nice group I met in this line sort of adopted me for the weekend, and I ended up running into them and sitting with them at several events. But I also talked to people over drinks and around town.
A great feature of this festival is focusing on the “behind-the-scenes” people on shows. Dawson’s Creek was another show I loved, probably because I could relate to the small-town North Carolina feel (although my experience was nothing like those kids). Creator/writer Kevin Williamson led a group of writers from the show, and it was a fascinating talk. It included people who have distinguished themselves in other shows, before and since, like Rob Thomas, Jenny Bicks and Anna Fricke.
I also went to a nice reading of other actors doing the Dawson’s Creek pilot. Williamson read all the directions, but it included Dawson cast member Kerr Smith, and stars of other shows like Mae Whitman, Abigail Spencer and Stacey Oristano. It was hilarious that the gender roles were swapped, and Louanne Stephens nailed it as Grams when she croaked her first line “Jennifer.”
But the long anticipated, big event was the Gilmore Girls reunion. There were multiple actors from the show who made the trip. It was very emotional when the show opened and everyone in the theater sang along with the very well known Carole King theme song “If you’re out on the road, feeling lonely and so cold…” It started with a chat with the “Gilmore Girls” themselves – Lauren Graham (Lorelai), Alexis Bledel (Rory) and Kelly Bishop (Emily), along with producer Sherman-Palladino. After this chat about how they got these roles and what they meant to them, a very nice clip package was shown that focused on the work of Edward Herrmann, who played Richard Gilmore. He sadly passed away in December. The clips highlighted a great body of work in this show.
When the rest of the cast joined them on stage, there was an empty chair saved for Herrmann. Sherman-Palladino said that he had been the first to agree to the reunion. It was clear from the discussion that all truly loved the experience and realized how special it was. It was also clear that they are all game for working together again and know that the fans are clamoring for a movie or Netflix series or whatever… Scott Patterson, who played Luke of the diner and a Lorelai love interest, has been particularly vocal about doing this for the fans. But Sherman-Palladino said that nothing was in the works. Hopefully the buzz around this event will prove to someone with money and power that something like this would be gainful and entertaining. Make it so!
It was great that so many from the show were not only in town, but were walking amongst fans and and enjoying photographs and chats. Scott Patterson was everywhere on Twitter. I got giddy when Yanic Truesdale (Michel) and Liza Weil (Paris) walked by me while I was having lunch. For just a second, I felt like I was in Stars Hollow.
And this photo above just made me happy.
Even with the fast pass, we waited in line for quite a long time. I heard that about 150 people, with badges in the regular line, did not get in. I feel bad for them. I do understand the stress the festival must have been under, and I do feel that they did their best and learned a lot. But overall, I had a good time and hope that others visiting our city did as well. I look forward to attending this event again in the future!