The Untold Truth Of Gilmore Girls

That iconic blue welcome sign for Stars Hollow has finally come back into view thanks to Netflix's revival series, Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life. The four-part film series serves as a follow-up to the whip-smart dramedy show, which championed the tagline "life's short, talk fast" during its seven season run.

Now, fans can expect to revisit Lorelai, Rory, Emily, Luke, Sookie, Jess, Logan, and the whole gaggle of townies that made its original run such a conversation piece. The behind-the-scenes history that went into making the show such a bingeable streaming sensation is nearly as rich as one of Taylor Doose's town tales, so here's a look back at the untold truth of Gilmore Girls.

There are two very different versions of Carole King's "Where You Lead" available for your listening pleasure. The first, which she co-wrote in 1970 with Toni Stern, was a romantic ode that the legend herself later recanted because of its lyrical message of a woman following her man, despite her own interests and direction in life. "It came out before women's lib, and it's got kind of a 'stand by your man' lyric," she told the crowd at London's Hyde Park in 2016, as she performed the rest of her 1971 album Tapestry, in which the original number appeared.

King famously refused to perform the track live during her Tapestry concerts, but Gilmore Girls gave her an opportunity to the turn the song into something entirely different: a love song for the mother-daughter bond she shared with her own daughter, Louise Goffin, instead of a romantic ballad.

As Sherman-Palladino told EW, "We were just looking for something that felt classic and you just don't get more classic than Carole King—there's just nobody better. It was a song about connection and it was a song about where you lead, I'll follow – that we'll always be together."

Palladino thought it was a shot in the dark that they might get the rights to play the song in the intro, but then King offered something even better for the show and herself. "We got to her and what was weird is she said, 'I don't do that song anymore in concert because it's about a woman following a man and I feel that the times are different and I don't want to be singing about a woman following a man. But I love the idea of a mother and a daughter and if I could re-record it with my daughter and turn this song that I wrote into something more relevant, I would love to do that.'" And love it she does because now she can and does perform the modern version alongside the rest of her Tapestry tracks.

It's probably difficult for the Gilmore Girls faithful to imagine anyone else but Alexis Bledel as the ice-eyed, reluctant debutante Rory, but it's probably even more difficult to picture Liza Weil in the role. Weil, who played the snappy gunner Paris Geller, told BuzzFeed that she originally auditioned for the part of Rory but won something completely different in the process: Palladino designed the part of Paris specifically for her. "My fully formed self now sees it as a huge compliment that that's what they came up with from me reading originally for Rory," she explained. "Paris could just do anything. One I came to accept that, I had a great time."

Meanwhile, the sunny star chef Sookie St. James was supposed to originally be played by actress Alex Borstein, who got tied up with MadTV obligations. Sookie's love interest on the show, Jackson Belleville, was actually played by Borstein's own husband, Jackson Douglas. Melissa McCarthy eventually stepped into her chef's coat—although Sherman-Palladino said it was a "tricky sell" to get her the role—and Alex Borstein instead appeared in bit roles throughout the series, including the razor-tongued harpist Drella and Emily Gilmore's eccentric stylist Miss Celine.

Graham was long rumored to have had a feud with Scott Patterson, who played her on-and-off leading love interest Luke Danes; some conspiracy theorists even alleged that Lorelai married Christopher instead of Luke because of Graham and Patterson's off-screen feud.

In a 2005 interview with TV Guide, Graham said that her relation with Patterson was "fine" and and that they "work well together" and had a "functioning, working set," but did admit that they weren't best friends with one another, either. (Another actress from Patterson's later show Aliens in America pegged him as "horrible" to work with, fanning the flames of the Gilmore feud.) Patterson himself echoed Graham's original sentiment, telling TV Guide that they had "a very comfortable working relationship" and that he "enjoyed doing scenes with her."

Putting almost a decade in between the end of season 7 and A Year in the Life must have done the pair good, though, because they were all smiles in his behind-the-scenes snapshot from the reboot series shoot.

If you feel like you've seen some of the Stars Hollow houses somewhere else before, you're probably right. ABC Family/Freeform's Pretty Little Liars uses the same WB set pieces as Gilmore Girls did, so a lot of properties—including Lorelai's house, Luke's Diner, Miss Patty's dance studio, and Kim's antiques—were transformed for that show and then some were used again for Grease: Live. PLL's use of the sets made them uninhabitable for the new Gilmore run because, as Sherman-Palladino told the TCA 2016 crowd (via Mashable), "they changed our Stars Hollow! They got a deal on brown paint! ... There was still the sidewalks we put in, they are cracked."

For A Year in the Life, though, the sets had to be completely rebuilt based on mere imagery from the show, and the cast and creatives seemed to be able to tell the difference, per their chat with Entertainment Weekly. For Patterson, Luke's Diner was "nicer" and "bigger" in revival form. Meanwhile, Kelly Bishop, who played the family matriarch Emily Gilmore, also found her faux home to be even more spacious than the last. "I was in the dining room and it's bigger. Because when you used to go by the dining room table there was the credenza by the side and it was a bit of a squeeze and there's no squeeze now," she explained.

The death of actor Edward Herrmann in the off-time between Gilmore Girls' ending and the start of the revival was a somber one for the women who played his familial namesakes. And paying respect to his memory and that of his character Richard Gilmore was reportedly a very grounding experience for everyone involved. Graham told the TCA crowd (via Mashable) that Herrmann's death was "part of our story that we were telling. The journey of how everyone is sort of recovering. That gave the show a depth and emotional complexity that felt to me 'here's the show grown up even more.' I mention that because it plays into all the choices the characters are making."

While the news of Netflix's Gilmore Girls revival was exciting for everyone involved, one person who seemed to be snubbed on the invite list was McCarthy, whose Sookie was an icon of the original show but who has since gone on to become an A-lister in Hollywood. She told E! Online that she wasn't even invited to rejoin the show at first, despite Sherman-Palladino's suggestion that she was too busy for the new version. After that, Sherman-Palladino put an olive branch out by way of her Entertainment Weekly chat, saying, "There's nothing malicious going on. "We've just put it out into the universe; we're here until May 10. I know what the scene is. I'll pre-light it for her. She can drive up, run in, shoot it, and run out. I can get her in and out in two hours."

Given the swarm of familiar faces that joined the project by that point, the absence of Sookie would have been a pretty glaring omission, but the good news was that stars (hollow) aligned, and McCarthy's schedule eventually did clear up for her to do her bit. There were murmurs of co-star discontent over her hefty payday for the small cameo, but her on-screen BFF was certainly delighted.