Gilmore Girls revival: Max Medina didn't make the cut

Once she was given the greenlight to revive Gilmore Girls on Netflix, creator Amy Sherman-Palladino tried to make room for everyone from the original cast. While some were more challenging (Melissa McCarthy), others were super easy (Sparky is back as Lorelai’s dog Paul Anka). But there was one person she just couldn’t fit into the story.

“Once the three leads [Lauren Graham, Alexis Bledel, and Kelly Bishop] were honored and Luke [Scott Patterson] was honored, then [it was a question of], how do we honor all our other characters? We wanted to get this person in and this person in,” Sherman-Palladino tells EW. And she did manage to find a way in for so many … except Max Medina. Longtime viewers may recall that Max was Rory’s English teacher from Chilton who dated Lorelai back in season 1, only to propose and have his heart broken.

“One person I didn’t figure out how to get in was Scott Cohen, whom we love so much. Not that we’re not still thinking about him, but we couldn’t figure out how to get Max in there,” the Gilmore creator explains. “We had so much story. We left storylines on the cutting room floor before we started.”

As for Gilmore fans who contacted Sherman-Palladino and co-exec producer Dan Palladino after the Netflix deal was signed, asking to make an appearance? They squeezed in Graham’s Parenthood costar Mae Whitman and Bunheads’ Sutton Foster, but not many beyond those.

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“By the time [the Netflix deal] was announced we had written all four of these movies so we couldn’t adjust them,” says Palladino. “If Meryl Streep had announced she wanted to come in we would have said, ‘Sorry, Meryl. Too late.’ ” Seriously? “Well, maybe not Meryl.”

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