I simply MUST hear of all the manifest failures of Gilmore Girls.
The more I think about this, the more I think that there’s One Failure, and in fact it’s less of a failure and more of a Sin, which is that Gilmore Girls seems to be purposely misleading about which genre it is.
We start the show on a very hopeful, positive note: Rory has just gotten into a good school. And because Rory has gotten into a good school, an opportunity arises for reconciliation with Richard and Emily. Lorelai isn’t looking for reconciliation, and views interacting with her parents as a chore, but Rory is hoping for healing, and does manage to start building up good, loving relationships with her grandparents, whom she had only previously met at stuffy holiday dinners with lots of strangers. Rory’s hope that they can be more like a real family spurs movement: Emily tells Richard in “Rory’s Birthday Parties”, “I don’t know my daughter at all.” The show implicitly promises that this is its direction, its aim. We are led to believe this is a story of redemption, a story which will end with a new, healed family: Richard and Emily learning to respect and support Lorelai, Lorelai getting married to Luke and having another child with a loving and equal partner, Rory being held up by everyone’s love for her.
But actually, Gilmore Girls is a tragedy. I haven’t even seen the revival, but even before that, the actual trajectory of the show isn’t redemption, healing, and growth, it’s the sins of the past constantly repeating themselves. The theme of Gilmore Girls is “things get worse and also nothing really changes”. Contrived finale reconciliation aside, at the end of the show, Lorelai’s relationship with her parents is in some ways worse than when the show started. At the beginning of the show, she had 1 grievance with them: they were controlling and insufficiently supportive during her pregnancy. She doesn’t like them much as people, finds them annoying, but she’s an adult, she deep down knows they were doing their best, and she can handle being around them once or twice a year. By the end of the show, they have inflicted many more wounds on her, see especially purposely sabotaging her one healthy relationship with Luke, and stealing her daughter. And Rory, who started out with so much love to give, ends the show with a similar relationship to her grandparents as her mother has - she has been betrayed and manipulated by them, too. Instead of her family coming together to lift her up, so she could have a brighter future and a happier life than they did, she ends up isolated, struggling with self-worth and with relationships, worse off than her mother ever was.
It makes me wonder whether Amy Sherman-Palladino even likes small towns - because when you look at it abstractly, “single mother and her daughter keep making the same tragic mistakes over and over” isn’t actually a story about the small joys of a small community. It’s a story about stasis, a stasis which is embodied in a cute little town that looks sunny but never changes. And I still like Stars Hollow, because it reminds me of where I grew up (we also had a few weird festivals), but at the end of the day I’m not sure I was meant to like Stars Hollow.
This One Big Sin - pretending to be a story about the healing of a family when actually it’s a cyclical tragedy - covers a multitude of other ones. It’s why Christopher keeps coming back, and why he can’t ever stay. It’s why Luke and Lorelai never got married and never had a child. It’s why Rory’s first love can be so terrible and so romanticized at the same time. It’s why Jess couldn’t find a home with Luke, even though they loved each other. It’s why Lane randomly ends up married and pregnant with twins, paralleling Sookie. And especially it’s why “Mom, I’m pregnant” is supposed to be a satisfying ending to the show.
That said, I do still really enjoy the first two or three seasons of the show, when the mirage of what the show could have been was in full effect!
Thanks for asking!!
I don't want to know how many re-binge sessions it took to articulate this marverlousness, but you have summed up my exact thoughts. I recently wrapped up watching the entire show, holding out my candle in hopes of healing and maturity to come, and it never did. Then my let down hopes clicked the play button to 'A Year in Life' chapters, and was let down again, with a few millennial references thrown in.
But I loved the hopeful and old-school vibe of the show so much that I went back and watched the first season again, just to keep good memories intact. I can't still bear through the parts where Lorelai dumps Max and Rory treats Dean like trash when Jess comes along. I'm all for the ships, but had the roles been reversed and the guys would have treated our female leads that way, it would have generated emotions far worse and aggressive than sympathy.