Caitlin and I recently binge-watched all seven seasons of Gilmore Girls, from Rory's acceptance to Chilton to the start of her post-college career -- the first watch for her, the second for me. It is comfort food par excellence.
Some general observations:
* If you never got around to the show or dismissed it out of hand (possibly-just-possssibly because you have a penis and the show has "girls" in the title), the core concept is simple: Lorelai Gilmore and her teenage daughter Rory are best friends. Lorelai grew up in a world of privilege and wealth, became pregnant at 16, and left home to get a job as a maid and raise her daughter on her own, rather than be hustled into marriage and have her life continue to be plotted out by her parents. As Rory grows up, Lorelai rises in the ranks of the inn where she works, and is running it when the series begins. The pilot introduces the basic conflict: Rory has been accepted to fictional prep school Chilton, as the first step toward her dream of going to Harvard, but Lorelai can't afford the tuition without her parents' help -- which comes with the requirement that Lorelai reestablish social ties with her family.
* Both Lauren Graham and Kelly Bishop (as her mother Emily) absolutely deserved Emmy nominations for this show. Oh, there are plenty of other great performances, but Graham is perfectly suited to Amy Sherman-Palladino's dialogue and sensibilities, and Bishop brings way more nuance to Emily Gilmore than you would expect from a broadcast television show.
* This is one of those hour-long shows, like Ally McBeal, Northern Exposure, Picket Fences, that puts the lie to the conventional wisdom that half-hour shows are comedies and hour-long shows are dramas. Ally McBeal usually gets the nod for breaking that mold, but the hour-long dramedy has been around since at least St Elsewhere, and ABC experimented with the half-hour dramedy in the form of Steven Bochko's Hooperman only a couple years later.
* I asked Caitlin what she had expected from it before she saw it (she loved it more than she expected), and she said she was afraid it might be precious and cute and quirky. Which it is! But it works. Maybe it's simply because it's quirky and genuine, whereas even Ally McBeal -- a show I liked in its heyday -- seemed unbelievably contrived in its quirkiness, and had to lean hard on the ability of actors like Peter McNichol to sell that quirk. Stars Hollow is a goofy place, but -- especially from second season on -- it's a consistently and predictably goofy place. Lorelai is a little quirky, but she's not random.
* For all that Lorelai and Rory never stop eating, the show does not really care very much about food. I don't just mean that the food isn't fancy -- Sookie's food at the inn is plenty fancy -- but that the show doesn't dwell on the particulars in the way that it might now in this newly slider-obsessed sriracha-driven America. Food is eaten. Lots of it. Pancakes and hamburgers. Never Indian food unless Lorelai isn't home. Little else is said about it.
* Though Amy Sherman-Palladino or her husband Daniel Palladino write most of the episodes, over the course of the series, other credited writers include future Orange is the New Black creator Jenji Kohan, The O.C's Allan Heinberg (also the creator of the Young Avengers comic), Buffy's Jane Espenson, The Big Bang Theory creator Bill Prady, veteran writing team James Berg and Stan Zimmerman (who wrote for my beloved Hooperman, as well as the "lesbian kiss" episode of Roseanne), Freaks and Geeks' Rebecca Rand Kirshner, and Ellen co-creator David S. Rosenthal, among others. After the 6th season, with the move to the CW, the Palladinos couldn't come to terms with the network on the writing budget -- with so many episodes credited to the two of them, the network apparently balked at hiring a full room, but had to do so anyway when the Palladinos called their bluff and left the show. Unfortunately the loss is felt, which I'll talk about below.
* There are some weird artifacts of shows that straddle the line between the Disposable TV and TV Forever eras -- for instance, Sean Gunn plays two different characters (as does Sherilyn Fenn, much more weirdly, though the reasons for the weirdness are spoilers), and that's one thing, but when the second and more permanent character -- Kirk -- shows up, he's initially new to Stars Hollow. By the end of the series, it's established that he grew up there, went to school with Luke, etc.
That's just the tip of a continuity-strangeness iceberg that becomes apparent when you binge-watch the show. The chronology and specifics of various events before the pilot are a little unclear, especially when it comes to Luke's love life, how long Lorelai has known Luke, and how she's been so involved in this town's life for a minimum of a decade but can still be surprised by things everyone else knows (things that have happened while she's been living there, in particular). All the moreso since she's spent that decade living next to Babette, one of the town's most prominent gossips.
It's not really important, and it's nowhere near as big as Mad About You replacing Jamie's parents not just with new stunt-casted actors but completely different characters late in its run. But like I said: when you binge-watch shows produced before binge-watching was possible, you spot some things.
Okay, let's get to spoiler stuff.
Best character outside the Gilmore family: Paris Geller. I don't know why Liza Weil isn't in more stuff -- between this and Bunheads, she shows a real genius for a particular type of charming officiousness and attention to detail, without descending into the sitcommy overload of later-seasons Monica on Friends/Danny on Full House. She can sell the ridiculous and make it seem real. Her scenes with Danny Strong's Doyle are terrific too.
Kirk of course is great, sort of the show's Kramer, and I love Lane and Todd, and TJ is hilarious. And Sebastian Bach will always be a favorite. There are not many bad characters here, apart from love interests.
Best character overall: Well, Lorelai, but that's almost too easy, so let's point out Emily too. Emily is one of those great characters who is often likeable and sympathetic -- in many conflicts, the most sympathetic -- but never loses the edge that makes her Lorelai's occasional antagonist. Yes, she's a snob. Yes, she's entitled and spoiled and sheltered. Yes, she's judgmental. And yet. And yet, and yet, and yet. She so often shows heart, and genuine love for her daughter and granddaughter, not to mention hurt at the regularity with which the family to whom she has devoted herself belittles her. It's a master class performance.
One of the interesting things about Lorelai is that she is pretty deeply flawed, and some of those flaws are celebrated by the show but still sort of acknowledged. For instance, her fights with Rory are as dramatic and traumatic as they are in large part because she and Rory are friends -- I'm not actually convinced Lorelai is a very good parent. She just hasn't had to be -- Rory has never misbehaved until her late teens, and seems to have been born brilliant. She's a bookworm whose mother never cracks open a book -- Lorelai has both native intelligence and has grown up in an environment that supported that, but seems to have purposefully abandoned any kind of intellectual engagement beyond making fun of movies.
Lorelai's also a pretty terrible daughter: she has plenty of reason to resent or feel distant from her parents, and there are plenty of things about her parents and their world that she is right to reject, but she continues to reject them (again and again and again) or make fun of them behind their backs (again and again and again) even when they're being good and sincere. On top of that, while her relationship with her parents revolves around money and her determination not to take it from them, she doesn't own the fact that she grew up with immense privilege and never had that privilege taken from her -- while her life has been an admirable one, it involved risks that she could more easily take, knowing there was a safety net if she really needed it. Look at how poor her basic life skills are -- when she isn't running the inn (which she is, absolutely, very good at), she's still pretty much a 16 year old.
I find it unbelievable that she hasn't been in a single relationship between Rory's birth and dating Max 16 years later. That's outright stated a few times, and there are allusions early in the series to her having a history of casual dating with guys she goes out with a few times but never introduces to Rory (none of them are from Stars Hollow, presumably), and of sleeping with these guys. But nobody, really, nobody until Max was someone she wanted to continue dating? It just seems implausible, and if it's to protect Rory, then frankly I think it's a bad choice and a bad example. Good parenting doesn't require displays of self-sacrifice for your children's alleged sake. Kids -- daughters especially -- instead should learn by example how to prioritize your own happiness and satisfaction without doing so at the expense of others.
I'm not saying I don't like Lorelai. Far from it, she's great, but that's the thing -- she's human, she's well-developed, and so when you give her this much space, her flaws become obvious.
Until this rewatch, Richard had been my favorite. But the more you like Emily, the less likable Richard becomes. By the end of the series, it's clear that while he certainly loves her, he may never fully appreciate her -- that his pride in his daughter is predicated on (and his pride in his granddaughter even contingent on) the ways in which they differ from his wife. That said, this is a fantastic conflict to see dramatized, even if it makes for many sad realizations throughout the course of the show, which are only occasionally made explicit (nearly always by Emily, who is furthermore the most perceptive character on the whole show, despite the number of jokes at her expense about how sheltered she is from pop culture and the world of young folks).
Lorelai's love interests:
Fuck Christopher. Well, fuck Christopher as a love interest for Lorelai, anyway. He makes total sense -- he's smart enough, charming enough, etc., that a) we see what Lorelai saw in him when they were teenagers, and b) we understand the ingredients that went into making Rory. But in many ways he's like Richard, not just in that he's blind to how privileged and entitled he is, but that he has always considered getting together with Lorelai to be a possibility -- a door that will never close all the way. Nevermind that she rejected him when they were teenagers -- what did she know, right? Nevermind that he in turn leaves her for a pregnant girlfriend -- not only leaves her, but retroactively makes their relationship a secret, unhappens it -- in order that he doesn't leave two fatherless babies out there. As far as Christopher and Richard are concerned (and Emily at critical moments, obviously), Lorelai is always a possibility. There's something toxic about that attitude, even apart from the context of the show.
The worst thing about the final season is the Christopher and Lorelai marriage. Bad enough that the last Palladino season ended with the two of them sleeping together -- I'm sure I would have been frustrated by the start of season seven even if the Palladinos had stayed on, for that reason. But to compound the error made for some very frustrating viewing. It was a terrible marriage, which both parties handled badly.
Digger is charming, smart, funny, and grew up in the Gilmore world, so he doesn't need Lorelai's parents explained to him, nor does he have the hang-ups about her privileged upbringing that it's sometimes implied Luke has. In some ways this makes him a perfect match - he's Christopher without the baggage. From a dramatic standpoint, he is far and away the best non-Luke love interest, because his relationship with Lorelai makes total sense from start to finish -- the attraction and chemistry are understandable, the conflicts along the way (hiding their relationship) equally understandable, and the way it ends offers a great comment on Lorelai's character. Lorelai bitches about her parents all the time, sure, and sometimes her conflict with them becomes really heated -- but she can't sit still and let Digger go to war with her father. She's not going to take sides against the family, not like that. A lot of the time when Lorelai's bitching about her family, it seems unearned -- Emily may be silly or misguided but is often just trying to help, or truly wants to spend time with her daughter, for instance. It's nice to see that when push comes to shove, Lorelai probably understands this.
Max is just boring, but feels appropriate to the first season: the world is changing for our Gilmore girls, with Rory going to prep school and for the first time fully encountering the world of her grandparents. Max is a part of that world, but not as fully as one of the dads, or Digger. And obviously, Lorelai dating Rory's teacher sets up a pretty basic conflict too, and works well given that the fight they have in the pilot -- supposedly the first serious fight they've ever had -- is precipitated by Rory's discovery of boys.
This leaves Luke of course. The very first scene of the show -- introduced with the La's "There She Goes," too late to be current and too early to be nostalgic! -- is Lorelai going into Luke's diner to get coffee, and the series establishes their attraction very quickly. Interestingly, there isn't even the usual Ross-and-Rachel will-they-or-won't-they type dynamic here, not built-in -- later you have some hints of one of them thinking they may be the only one interested, but it's certainly never Ross chasing after his dream girl, nor are there any artificial obstacles like "oh but he's my boss" or "oh but she's engaged to my best friend," or all those sitcom things. At first, you just have a couple who have been casual acquaintances for such a long time that it's weird to make the transition to dating, especially since they're a part -- small, but a part -- of each others' daily lives. This is natural and believable, and it works particularly well given that they've known each other for years before the series begins.
Luke is a good guy and they're a great match -- he understands her flaws but doesn't hold them against her, he has an independent friendship with Rory, and he admires about Lorelai many of the ways in which she differs from him, rather than being bothered by those differences. They would be a natural match even if the show weren't structured to make them so. Of course, he has some glaring inconsistencies -- the beginning of the series repeatedly establishes his pop culture illiteracy in contrast with Lorelai's reference-popping, and yet by the end of the series (even before the Palladinos leave) he's making movie references that shouldn't come naturally to him. So it goes. (Part of it seemed to be an effort to make audiences like him more as a love interest, since they also tousled his hair and made him take his baseball cap off a lot more often.)
It's bizarre that Scott Patterson hasn't been in more things post-Luke Danes.
The show is at its weakest when it puts the core relationships of the series -- Lorelai and Rory, Loralai and Luke -- in jeopardy. In the latter case, that means the Jess years when Luke was unable to see Jess's faults and Lorelai occasionally overreacted to them, and seasons six and seven, when Luke and Lorelai are finally dating but clash over his newly discovered daughter (and sometimes Christopher).
So that brings us to Rory, especially since Lorelai's engagement to Luke comes at the exact same moment -- and in response to -- her deepest rift with her daughter, which sets up a particularly frustrating and fidgety spell for the show in season six.
Oh Rory.
I have to say, most TV shows involve a leap of faith, some suspension of disbelief, and with Gilmore Girls, it's accepting that Rory Gilmore is brilliant. I think this is a little bit an acting problem and a little bit a writing problem -- we repeatedly see Rory with books, and often those books are challenging ones for teenagers, but we don't actually see any particular effect all this reading has had on her. Other than being a little timid and inexperienced with the opposite sex, she doesn't really act like a "smart kid" or a bookish kid -- not just the TV portrayals of such, but real-life ones. On the other hand, it's nice to see that she's not just cut from Big Bang Theory nerd cloth, either. Give the show credit for understanding the difference between "smart kid" and "Star Trek geek," which television in general is so awful at. (What happened, Prady?)
Rory's love interests:
There are really two Deans. There's high school Dean, Rory's first boyfriend, who is clueless in the manner of teenage boys and seems like he could easily be the younger version of an According to Jim/King of Queens type oaf. He's often sweet, often well-meaning, but fundamentally dumb-at-relationshipping. He's got some gender hangups and he can't relate to Rory intellectually -- and more importantly, he doesn't seem to want to -- but he's basically your typical high school love interest. Rory shouldn't end up with him, but nobody should wind up with anyone they dated in high school.
Then there's Cheating Dean, when Rory comes back to Dean after he's married and she's broken up with Jess, which causes one of the major Rory/Lorelai rifts and pretty much makes all parties involved look dumb and icky. Cheating Dean is all about sex. Even after he and his wife have separated and his relationship with Rory is public, their relationship is exclusively sexual -- they have nothing to talk about, no shared interests. It's like Rory had two stereotypical high school relationships, but with the same guy.
In between is Jess, which rhymes with oh my God, fuck Jess.
Jess is fucking awful and if you like Jess you are fucking weird.
Jess is like a James Dean Xerox without irony.
Jess is like if Jordan Catalano never shut the fuck up.
Jess makes total sense for Rory at this point in her life, insofar as he is the mistake she is most likely to make: the one thing he offers her, talkin' 'bout books, is the biggest thing Dean can't. That's exactly how adolescents think, seeking out the one thing they're lacking without considering whether they will be giving up other things in exchange.
Thankfully, by the time Jess's final appearance rolls around, he actually seems to have grown up -- his scenes with Luke give good closure on that front, since Luke's failure to make Jess stop sucking was some baggage the character was always going to carry.
So that leaves Logan, and Logan is actually pretty good. Like Digger with Lorelai, he has enough in common with Rory's background to not be weirded out by her family's wealth or her being a Yale student. Like Jess, he's an underachiever rather than disinterested like Dean, because part of the molecular makeup of the show means that Rory can never be with someone smarter than her -- we can never seriously entertain the idea that someone in her peer group could be smarter than her, there are only peers with better connections or more opportunities than her. Whether this is in part to shore up the fact that Rory is not actually convincingly smart, well, I leave that as an exercise to the reader.
Logan is like all red flags -- rich and spoiled, older than Rory, snobbish, unable to be serious, total lack of relationship experience or monogamy -- but none of those red flags actually bring about serious danger, compared to Jess or Dean. His father is the only serious problem, since it's his criticism that causes Rory to steal a freaking yacht, tell her mother to fuck off, and quit Yale, and to do these things without any hint that she might realize she's acting rashly.
Unlike Lorelai's guys, Rory's boyfriends aren't really eligible for permanent-partner status -- you can't seriously want a high school or college student to wind up forever with the person who happens to be right for them at that moment. So while I wouldn't want to see Rory becoming Mrs Gilmore-Huntzberger, this isn't a very serious consideration in the end.
I could go through season by season and talk about highs and lows, but instead I just want to draw attention to season 6, episode 18. This is a culmination of many of the things the Palladinos have been laying down: Lorelai and Luke are still engaged, but the wedding has been indefinitely postponed because he's being a donk about his secret daughter, which still feels like a ridiculously contrived mechanism to create conflict between the two of them; suddenly wealthy Christopher is paying for Rory's tuition instead of her grandparents doing so; frictions abound from the Huntzbergers not thinking Rory is good enough for their family, Rory's fight with her mother that occupied the first half of the season, and so on.
And as a result, we get this piece of genius, written by Amy Sherman-Palladino and directed by Kenny Ortega, who directed some of the series' most energetic and frantic episodes (notably "They Shoot Gilmores, Don't They?" and "A Deep-Fried Korean Thanksgiving," both of which you can identify by their titles pretty easily). In a lot of ways this scene functions as a lynchpin for -- or even a fractal of -- the whole season. And again, since it's the last thing I'm going to say in this entry, let me point out how terrific Kelly Bishop is here.
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