WB’s “Gilmore Girls,” now a DVD set, didn’t waste episodes finding itself.

Words spill in wild torrents from the mouth of Amy Sherman-Palladino, creator and executive producer of “The Gilmore Girls.” Talking about her show -- the first season of which has just been enshrined on DVD -- she immediately displays the same idiosyncratic charm and unfiltered attitudes as her characters.

“I’m a DVD whore,” she enthuses. “I’ve got my ‘Buffy,’ my ‘NYPD Blue,’ my ‘Sopranos,’ and I watch them over and over and over again. I’m so thrilled they exist. The idea of our show as a box set is more than I can comprehend.”

The release Tuesday of the first season of “Gilmore Girls” on DVD provides a handy point of entry for people who might have missed the early episodes. Now in its fourth season on the WB network, the show chronicles the lives of Lorelai (Lauren Graham) and Rory (Alexis Bledel) Gilmore, a thirtysomething single mother and her ultra-precocious teenage daughter. Though no ratings smash, it has garnered a loyal following by balancing drama and comedy with a razor-sharp wit and lively exuberance.

What’s remarkable about these first 21 episodes is how the show’s voice was clear right from the pilot. Sherman-Palladino, who’d honed her skills on “Roseanne” and “Veronica’s Closet,” believes that surety of tone has been a big factor in the show’s growth and success.

“When you get into trouble,” she says, “is when you spend the first season finding the show. I’m not trying to say I knew everything, but from the pilot I knew what this show could be.... We weren’t spending every show trying to figure out, well, what’s Lorelei’s voice, who is Rory?”

Yet that initial confidence in the writing didn’t translate into confidence for the future of the show. “The pilot was amazing to me,” Sherman-Palladino says. “It was so fun to do because I was absolutely convinced that there was no way we were getting on the air, so there was zero pressure.”

Longtime “Gilmore” fans will enjoy seeing the first appearances of actor Sean Gunn, who provides comic relief as the recurring character Kirk, a townsperson who seems to have a new job with every appearance. He also went through a couple of name changes until one stuck.

“I think it was his third appearance that we called him Kirk,” she recalls. “Especially when there’s a lot of family drama going on, you want to have some levity, you’ve got to have some lightness or you just want to kill yourself. Sean Gunn came on as the guy installing DSL and was so funny. The next time we needed a workman, I remembered how on ‘I Love Lucy’ these character actors would come on one week as a waiter, the next week as a cab driver and it was the same actor.

“We just thought, let’s make Sean Gunn that guy. We wouldn’t explain it and it worked beautifully for us because it was just weird. Also I just didn’t want to sit through another casting session.”

Because the show centers around three generations of Gilmore women (the grandmother, played by Kelly Bishop, is also a central character), it has a reputation as being a “chick show” -- which isn’t right, Sherman-Palladino says. If anything, the thing that divides audiences isn’t gender but appreciation for rapid-fire dialogue. The show is frequently compared to classic screwball comedies such as “His Girl Friday” because the characters chatter away at breakneck speed. “The Gilmore Girls” is not for the hard of hearing.

“You like it or you don’t,” she concedes. “I know it’s personal taste. It’s the way I’ve always liked to write. Nothing can be fast enough for me. To me comedy that goes slow is not comedy. It is not funny, there’s no energy, there is no life. What banter does for me, it says there’s a rhythm between these people, that they know each other. It’s a connection.”

The characters are not just connected, though, they’re supernaturally clever. Cultural references, some dizzyingly obscure, gush from the mouths of her characters. Sherman-Palladino says that’s at the heart of the show’s objective.

“I know its great kids are reading ‘Harry Potter,’ ” she says, “but it’d be nice if one kid puts down ‘Harry Potter’ for five seconds and picked up Mark Twain. Kids especially are so heavily marketed to, I believe it’s good to let them know there’s something more out there than what they’re being fed by the media. While we don’t preach to them, I’ve always felt like if I could get one kid to buy an XTC album over a Britney Spears album, we’ve done our job.”

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‘The Gilmore Girls’

The Complete First Season

What: 21 episodes on six DVDs

From: Warner Home Video

Price: $59.98

Extras: “Welcome to ‘The Gilmore Girls,’ ” a 21-minute behind-the-scenes documentary; a “Gilmore-isms” montage of sayings and references; “Gilmore Goodies and Gossip,” on-screen factoids during episode “Rory’s Dance”; and three deleted scenes.