In case the main thing you’ve been wondering throughout the Jill Abramson–Sulzberger fiasco is, “Did they base the family of Gilmore Girls’ Logan Huntzberger on the Sulzbergers?” the answer is, basically, yes. “Oh, absolutely,” the 2000–‘07 show’s creator Amy Sherman-Palladino told Vulture during an interview this morning. “It wasn’t even veiled — the word ‘berger’ is in there. We weren’t trying to be clever. We just figured that was the kind of family [Logan] would be part of.”
For those of you not still stuck in the early ‘00s, Logan (who was played by The Good Wife’s Matt Czuchry) was Rory Gilmore’s super-rich, delightfully Waspy newspaper scion boyfriend/almost-fiancé. While Sherman-Palladino never met a real live Sulzberger and “can’t attest to their personal qualities,” she wanted the Huntzbergers to be “a family of newspaper royalty in that vein. And a little, you know, a lot of them were bon vivants in addition to being in the business. There was a lot of jumping out of airplanes and shit like that.”
Though she declined to weigh in on Abramson’s situation, Sherman-Palladino, who’s bicoastal (though she mostly lives in Brooklyn now) does hold former L.A. Times–ian Dean Baquet in high regard. She and husband Daniel Palladino have “been mourning the L.A. Times for a long time. It used to be a great paper, and they totally killed it, and he was the guy who took a stand and refused to make those firings and cut and destroy the paper further,” she says of Baquet. “So to me, he’s kind of a hero.”
Not surprisingly for a writer who creates Über-charming TV worlds where everyone’s hyperliterate, Sherman-Palladino remains a print devotee (“We don’t read newspapers online. We like to hold them in our hands”), and, today, was on the way to the Times building for a tour, courtesy of Gail Collins: “We’re kind of geeking out on that.”
