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.
