Women Behind the Scenes Spotlight: Amy Sherman-Palladino

Today’s Women Behind the Scenes spotlight is shone on writer, director and producer Amy Sherman-Palladino.

Amy got her first big break working as a staff writer for the sitcom Roseanne in 1990. She stayed with the show until 1994, working her way up from story editor to executive story editor than later to co-supervising producer and then co-producer. She stayed with Roseanne until 1994.

Over the next couple of years she worked as a writer on the 1995 series Can’t Hurry Love and the following year was the creator and executive producer for the failed sitcom Love and Marriage. She followed that up the next year, working as a consulting producer and writer on the TV series Over the Top and working as an executive producer and writer on Veronica’s Closet.

It was at the turn of the century when Amy struck TV gold with Gilmore Girls, which ran for seven years. Amy, of course, worked as the executive producer for all but the last year of the show as well as writer and director.

In 2008, she was the creator, executive producer, writer and director of the short-lived series The Return of Jezebel James that was originally set for The CW, but aired on FOX for only three episodes. The following year she worked with HBO on a series that, sadly, never came to fruition and then in 2010, she worked on another failed pilot for The CW.

This year, however, Amy has the new show – Bunheads – ready to debut on the ABC Family channel on June 11. The series will star Tony winner Sutton Foster as a Las Vegas showgirl who, after impulsively getting married, moves to a sleepy coastal town and starts working at her mother-in-law’s dance studio.

In the meantime, Amy is to be writing the script for the Universal Pictures film The Better Woman that is to be about an executive whose boyfriend leaves her for an older woman. The executive then searches out the woman to find out what went wrong in the relationship.