Talking as Fast as I Can: From Gilmore Girls to Gilmore Girls, and Everything in Between(12)

Stars may or may not be just like us, but generally I’ve learned it’s a mistake to think anyone else has the answer to pretty much anything. When I hear Kim Kardashian lost her baby weight on Atkins, I’ll eat steak for three days straight until I remember that, oh yeah, I’ve tried this before and it didn’t make me feel that great. You have to find what works for you, not what works for someone else. I kept trying to be a vegan until I realized that part of my motivation was that I wanted to be able to go on the Ellen show and bond with her over it. I respect and adore Ellen so much, and she’s always been so supportive of me as an actor, writer, and producer. Because of her, I got to turn my novel Someday, Someday, Maybe into a pilot script for the CW, and I co-wrote another half-hour pilot for her company as well. She gave me opportunities I’d never had before, and it’s like I wanted to repay her by being more like her, which, if you think about it, is also the premise of the stalker movie Single White Female. It’s great to look up to people you admire, but you can’t make life decisions motivated by the hope that you’ll be invited to Ellen and Portia’s to eat lentils and watch Scandal.

Anyway, if you’re truly fed up and confused about all this, good news! For you, we have Soylent, a sludge-colored meal replacement concoction invented by people in Silicon Valley to enable them to cut out the pesky time that eating requires (lunch, pah—what a waste of brainpower!) and devote more time to creating new face-swapping apps. Meals including food? What are you, some sort of time-wasting East Coast pizza eater?



Every morning my father eats half a loaf of bread with butter, a giant smoothie, maybe an omelette with cheese, and then he has breakfast. I just want a piece of toast once in a while—is that so wrong?

Plus, I think it should be against the law to feel down on yourself regarding any issues that Oprah is still working on, and OPRAH IS STILL WORKING ON THIS ISSUE. She has rubbed elbows with heads of state and every celebrity in the universe, opened a school in Africa among other accomplishments, made millions of dollars, and helped scores of people live a better life, but, by her own admission, she is still working on diet-related topics. So to sum up: let’s all chillax about it and spend more time being kind to ourselves and doing truly useful things like trying to resuscitate words that were never cool, like chillax.

Good news! My accountant has just informed me that by imparting all these Top-Secret Hollywood Secrets to you, I’ve now saved you at least one zillion American dollars! Just make sure to mention me when you talk about it on the Today show (Hi, Kathie Lee and Hoda!).





I don’t know if we’ll ever live in a world where sixteen-year-old boys will throw their PlayStations in the trash because they’ve discovered they’d rather sit in the movie theater watching Best Exotic Marigold Hotel 12, but I’m guessing it probably won’t be in my lifetime. Most movies are made for people who want to watch Jurassic World over and over. Hollywood is mostly for young people, and young people mostly like to look at other young people because that’s who they relate to. The people who pay for movies and TV to get made are mainly making them for young people too. In television, “young people” are people ages eighteen to forty-nine. You may have heard of these people—they’re sometimes referred to as the “key demographic.” They’re the ones whose attention advertisers most want to capture on television and in the movies, and I’m going to tell you why: paper towels.

I was recently at the house of a friend who’d just made one of those trips to Costco where you feel really smug about all the money you saved until you get home and can’t fit the twenty-pound jar of generic peanut butter in any of your cupboards because you forgot about the ten giant jars you already have. So she was trying to get rid of some stuff. She offered me one of those twelve-packs of paper towels that can also be used as an air mattress if you have a guest over, and I was pretty psyched to take it off her hands. I happened to actually need paper towels, and I was like, wow, what a great coincidence. Then I looked at them a little more closely, and I realized they weren’t my brand of paper towels.



I always feel guilty when I use paper towels, but what makes me feel slightly better is getting the kind that are perforated at narrower intervals and can be ripped off into smaller sections. I feel better because at least I’m not using a whole towel. So I turned down these free, non-perforated paper towels, which my friend thought was crazy, and that’s how I suddenly realized I was out of the key demo.

To some degree, I get why our business likes ’em young. Advertisers want people they can convert, people who haven’t yet made up their minds about things like what their favorite paper towels are or what car they like to drive—people who might change their minds and switch to a different brand because of the ads they see. But as consumers get older, they decide what they like to use and they hardly ever deviate, which means advertisers need to move on to influence the next batch of potential paper towel devotees. Which is why there aren’t more older people—especially women, who apparently have a tendency to pick their paper towel preferences earliest—in movies and television.



“But what about Betty White?” you ask. You’re right! Betty White is hilarious, talented, and still working. That is so incredibly rare that she is literally the only person anyone ever mentions when challenging my paper towel theory. No one ever says “What about Betty White and Bathsheba Phlellington?” because Bathsheba Phlellington stopped getting work years ago, and that’s only partially because I made her up. There simply isn’t a ton of work for women in her category, and therefore there isn’t one other example of a Betty White type other than Betty White herself. There are a handful of women who are slightly younger than Betty that I could cite as examples, it’s true, but I dare you to name five who aren’t Meryl Streep and Diane Keaton or who don’t also have the word “Dame” in front of their name.