Amy Sherman-Palladino on TV’s Learning Curve and Wishful Thinking
I’m still trying to figure out what I think about Bunheads , Amy Sherman-Palladino’s delightfully weird and very, very female show about a dance school in California. But in Willa Paskin’s long and fantastic interview with Sherman-Palladino, she points out something I’ve found utterly baffling about the entertainment industry: I always find it funny that people take the wrong message from any success. Like “Bridesmaids” comes out and people go, “Oh, women are funny, they shit in the street. Let’s make sure now everybody shits in the street!” Not like, “OK, but it’s a well-constructed script with very good characters and the core of it is actually about female relationships,” nothing about that. They take the one shitting in the street thing and then for months you’re going to have every actress that you love shitting in the street. Until they realize, “Oh, it doesn’t work that way, I guess, so now women aren’t funny.” No, no, no! It’s not that women aren’t funny, it’s just that all of...