A description and then a confession. Description: I am a 37 year-old married father of two. I teach history, literature, and Catholic theology to college students. Besides my rather traditional Catholic piety, I fit all sorts of Stuff White People Like stereotypes from the thoughts of New York Review of Books articles dancing in my head to the New Balance sneakers covering my toes. Now here’s the confession: I love the Gilmore Girls, I offer this as a confession because I’m not exactly in the Gilmore Girls audience demographic. I sense this because when I mention the show in class, my female students laugh, then wonder if I’m joking, and then start making references to the show. My male students look around in complete befuddlement.
Netflix has produced four new 45 minute long episodes of the show, and these will be available for streaming on Friday. It’s safe to say I’ll have watched all four before I go to sleep on Saturday. (I’d say Friday, but we have a four month-old, and sleep is precious.)
The show centers around Lorelai Gilmore (Lauren Graham) and her daughter Rory (Alexis Bledel). Lorelai had Rory when she was 16, and she left her parents, the well-heeled Richard (Edward Herrmann) and Emily Gilmore (Kelly Bishop). Richard is an executive at an insurance company in Connecticut and Emily does charity work with the Daughters of the American Revolution and other such groups. At the beginning of the first season, Lorelai asks her parents to pay for the tuition at Rory’s private school, which resembles Choate. Lorelai and Rory also live in Connecticut in the idyllic Stars Hollow, where everyone knows your name and your business and everyone has breakfast at Luke’s, a local diner run by Luke (Scott Patterson), Lorelai’s sometime love interest.
The Gilmore Girls begins with Rory’s sophomore year in high school and ends with her senior year in college. In the seven seasons the show ran, we met Rory’s best friend Lane Kim (Keiko Agena), a Korean-American who has to hide her passion for rock music from her overbearing but loving mother who only wants Lane to date Korean-American Christians. We also meet Paris Geller (Liza Weil), Rory’s high school rival turned college friend, whose intelligence is matched only by her insecurity. And then there are Rory’s three boyfriends: Dean Forester (Jared Padaleki), the new boy who moves to Stars Hollow and doesn’t quite fit in; Jess Mariano (Milo Ventimiglia), the rebel whose literary interests and aspirations ultimately woo Rory; and Logan Huntzberger (Matt Czuchry), the college boyfriend who comes from the right family and has the right connections. (Jess is the best boyfriend. Obviously.)
The show is known for its rapid-fire dialogue, its wit, its cameo appearances from rock bands and celebrities, and the copious amount of coffee that everyone drinks. It’s all terribly clever, and I know I’m not the only one – we are legion! – who finds it quite addictive.
My brief description suggests that the Gilmore Girls is about mothers and daughters. The interactions between Lorelai and Rory are the basis of the show. The main tension comes from Lorelai’s desire to be both Rory’s mother and her best friend. Lorelai doesn’t want Rory making the same mistakes she made, but Lorelai also knows that one “mistake” she will never regret is having Rory when was only 16. Lorelai’s relationship to her own parents – especially her mother – is another key strand of the plot. Richard and Emily agree to pay for Rory’s tuition so long as Lorelai and Rory come to dinner every Friday night. (Edward Herrmann passed away in 2014, and from the previews the relationship between Emily and her daughter and grand-daughter will play and even bigger role in the reboot.) The show is also a coming-of-age drama and comedy as we see Rory deal with the sorts of things teenagers confront: boyfriends, girlfriends, cliques, rebellion, surviving high school, going away to college, and the rest.
At this point, you might be wondering, given my description, what about the show appeals to me. Well, the Gilmore Girls is, in the end, a fairy tale. But it’s an unusual one. I’ve never seen anyone argue this but it seems to me that the show is ultimately a fairy tale about class in America. All works of fiction require the willful suspension of disbelief, of course. But with the Gilmore Girls, we have to imagine that a 16 year-old girl gave birth, left her wealthy parents, found a job as a maid at a hotel where she was able to live, then later became the general manager of that hotel and then saved up enough money to open her own hotel. We’re required to believe further that her precocious daughter became, with little more than a library card. a voracious reader and went from an expensive prep school to the Ivy League. These Gilmore girls live in a big house in a solidly middle class town populated by small local businesses and the people who own them. There are few times when the class differences come to the fore, especially when Luke, Dean, and Jess meet Richard and Emily. Overall, though, clear class divisions exist, but they can also easily be crossed. The only nods to social and racial diversity in the show are Michel (Yanic Truesdale), Lorelai’s French-speaking black coworker and Lane, who (along with her mother) is the only conventionally “religious” person in the show. It’s a bit far fetched.
But it works. And I don’t think it works just because I have a soft spot in my hear for upper-crust WASP benevolence. (That benevolence, for all its many and various problems, gave me enough financial aid to get through college and gave me a free ride to two years of graduate school.) The show woks because we can suspend our disbelief enough to imagine a world where reconciliation between families is possible; where the love between mothers and daughters can be strained but never torn asunder; where people come together in communities to make decisions that affect the whole community; where reading and cultural literacy are seen as a bond between people, a ticket to more education and deeper friendships, and well, fun. If our world isn’t always like that, I certainly hope that we have experienced at least some of these things at least some of the time.
The Gilmore Girls will help your post-Thanksgiving digestion. Be warned though: some coffee might be necessary to help you stay alert enough to follow the dialogue. Stars Hollow is a dreamy world, but this weekend we all deserve some good dreams.
