Amy Sherman-Palladino: It’s actually comparable. Rachel [Brosnahan] is greeeeat at talking fast.

Dan Palladino: Sometimes I ask Rachel to slow down a little bit, and she is always a little bit shocked. She can talk even faster than Lauren Graham.

Sherman-Palladino: No one talks faster than Lauren Graham, come on! But Rachel gives her a run for her money. The difference is, on Maisel, because we have this thing called a budget, we can pay for all of the things we could never pay for on Gilmore Girls—like we can have some air in establishing shots. We can have montages and music and things that slow it down a bit. So the show might not feel as fast, but quite frankly, the [script] page count stacks up exactly the same.

What was your rationale for shooting in Paris this season?

Sherman-Palladino: We didn’t want it to be like the Brady Bunch goes to Hawaii, shooting someplace for no reason. But we had laid in some backstory with Rose and her fondness for Paris. After ending Season 1 with the family a little bit on edge—Rose realizing her relationship with Midge was shifting and Abe was keeping stuff from her—they were all on quicksand. [Paris] felt like a good place to go to further our story.

Amy, your parents were both in showbiz and your dad was part of the New York comedy scene in that era. Did you take elements from your family mythology?

Sherman-Palladino: We had no other survival skills in my family.

Palladino: Her father was a comic, her mother was always an entertainer: She was a dancer, she had a cabaret act, she sometimes played Vegas back in the 60s. That is how they met, because her father went to one of her mother’s shows and hit on her. For this project, a lot of our inspiration came from both of her parents. I knew Amy’s father for 25 years. He has passed away now, but you get to know all of the joy of a guy like that, and a lot of the insecurities that are part and parcel of the standup comedy business. He would be hanging out with his friends in the backyard, talking about opening for Johnny Mathis or Danny Kaye. . . . It’s funny, we were doing research for our Catskills sequence and our researchers found an advertisement for Amy’s dad playing the Catskills in 1970!

There’s a growing exhaustion with the pressure on female TV characters to be likeable. Midge is very invested in conventional femininity, but she also has no problem saying the unsayable.

Sherman-Palladino: I think it is one of the most ridiculous things in Hollywood, how they judge women on their likebility. . . . It’s a weird barometer and I think it has hurt female actresses a lot. Young actresses will come in to audition and if you have a yelling scene, it’s like, “Sweetie, yell! Just yell!” They’re almost apologizing, like, if I yell too much, I am going to be unlikable. To me, that is useless. Is it an interesting character or is it not an interesting character?

Midge is a completely adorable, absolutely confident woman. She thinks she is fantastic, and it takes other people to tell her, oh, by the way, you are not supposed to act like this, you are not supposed to say those things. It would never occur to her.

Palladino: We didn’t want her to be someone who, when she is dumped by her husband and has to move in with her parents, is sitting there thinking, my whole life has been a sham and a façade and that is not who I am. . . . With this new path, she is going to have a more exciting life. She’s going to make more money, she will probably have better sex with different men. She will have adventures and perhaps be famous. But she may never be as happy as she was the day before her husband left her. That has been a guiding principle for us—even if you want to judge it a false sense of security, she felt a comfort and a warmth in that life. She may never be able to trust people the way she trusted them before.