The Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life call sheet is longer than the list of Emily’s fired housekeepers, but there are a handful of alums who will be absent from the Netflix revival. Among the MIA vets: Wayne Wilcox’s Rory-crushing Marty.

But exec producers Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino (who wrote and directed all four installments, out Nov. 25) maintain that they very much wanted Wilcox’s fan favorite character to make the trip back to Stars Hollow.

“We absolutely tried,” Amy tells me in the following video Q&A. “[But] organically it just didn’t fit in. We love Wayne.” Daniel, meanwhile, explains that had they been able to lengthen each of the 90-minute chapters to two hours apiece, Marty would’ve surely made the cut.

“In true Palladino fashion, we broke out the six hours of story [and] we had about eight hours of story,” he notes. “So we had to rearrange things just to fit the format. Because we didn’t want to… tax the limits of people’s patience. We would’ve done a much bigger story.”

Press PLAY below to watch my Marty-centric exchange with Team Palladino. And then check back in the coming days for more from Amy and Dan — as well as Lauren Graham and Alexis Bledel and Scott Patterson — as TVLine’s “18 Days of Gilmore” scoop countdown continues.