Gilmore Girls, Retrospectively

How can one express?

...

The girls are... well, either you know or you don't. If you don't know, I understand it's my undertaken position to try to explain, but I'm feeling a lot of feelings about this lately and I just need you to be there for me right now.

In preparation for the Netflix revival, a rewatch from season 3 has been undertaken, and we're going to be one season shy by the time the new miniseries comes out. There will be four one-and-a-half hour episodes totaling six hours of instant classic Gilmore Girls.

In the pilot episode, the town of Stars Hollow is fully built and is consistent throughout the series. It's a comfortable happy place where all the problems are very neatly presented and you just don't need to worry about certain types of crime and human behavior pervading the still reasonably plausible little world they've made here. You come to adore the quaint goings on of the little plebs of the GG's small town; we laugh at their inferiority and quixotic personality disorders to feel better about ourselves while simultaneously rewarding ourselves for being so empathetic as to adore the little silly people. It works for me!  The nonsense they prioritize as well as the clear and present desperation they exude while struggling through the logic puzzles they entrap themselves within is just gold and serves as ample balm to my ego when I'm sad, sick or just nostalgic for a bizarre but naive and emotionally earnest padded emotional rollercoaster of youth - but you know, without any personal consequences.

We watch the development of Rory in concert with her actresses' progressing maturation into womanhood, and here again is gratification in feeling like we somehow contributed to the rearing of somebody any parent would be proud of without having to actually do anything. It's a princess story, is what it is; Rory Gilmore is the scrappy smalltown tomboy who's serious about education and somewhat inherits all the backing and support of a set of millionaire grandparents. These grandparents offer payroll allowing her to attend an extremely distinguished finishing school which sets her up for lofty post-secondary goals, but as in real life priorities shift and in finding her footing Rory makes the mistakes necessary to learn who one is and ultimately strike out at the world as a collected and composed Young Professional. She's gorgeous, but she doesn't know it. She loves intensely but with caution, and her always-appropriate curiosity is juxtaposed by her mother's untempered abandon and fits of passionate poor decision making. So really there's something for everybody all the time, the middle ground where these two meet keeps them in balance and each gives the other a fixed point in the universe around which they might revolve. Hijinks beset them as well as real tragedy, but there is no rape in Stars Hollow. It's like 9/11 never happens and things are pretty much solid on the East Coast.

Not to say certain characters don't wind up having relatively crappy lives, and not to say that a conscientious observer might conclude that certain characters are the way they are because their upbringings were objectively just awful, but room is left for younger, more tender viewers to whom this might not occur to let those subtly dark themes slip by. We get that it was hard for Lorelai and Lane in that we get that it was hard for Cinderella to have to do all the cookery and washing up for her evil step-sisters, but there is room to linger over what's entailed in what we know about the respective characters histories (much less endings) and think: "Fuck."

And speaking of endings, the series didn't, not properly. They sort of left things open for a new season, but this was during the time that downloading was really becoming a thing, and I'm not sure they really had any idea how many people were watching at that point, and there's no real reason why they would. Netflix brings back what people watch, and I still remember the thrill of hearing the two were joining forces while silently steaming at having spent paper money, Christmas money, at an age when those two things meant quite a bit, on a box set (which is admittedly now somewhat scattered).

I remember being told by a friend that Gilmore Girls was the first show ever erected by an advertising conglomerate as a result of market testing on the tone, tempo and nature of what is acceptable for mothers and daughters after school with regards to susceptibility. If you imagine how pleasant and fast an advertiser needs to give you thirty seconds of voiceover about why you could really use a particular brand of cleaning agent, that's the speed and rhythm of a good amount of the conversation in Gilmore Girls. They want you pliant and supple when you are delivered to the commercial, already lulled into their language and nature, anesthetized and eager to be told. When the advertiser speaks to you, it is easier to imagine they are your friend in some sinister way, but watching the show without commercials is like all the glory of getting drunk without getting hosed with a bar bill later. But you know. Emotionally drunk.

Watch Gilmore Girls.