A rather lengthy essay follows…<\/a><\/p>\n In the early hours of Sunday morning one weekend in August I found myself unable to fall asleep. I knew from experience that sleep was far off, so to pass the time I dug out season one of The Gilmore Girls. I’d flirted with the show in the past – catching a few minutes of random episodes on the recommendation of online friends and had gone so far as to get my hands on the DVD box set. I put in the first disc and started to watch. Coffee At Luke’s Jennifer Crusie This book collects a very unimpressive selection of essays about the TV show The Gilmore Girls. I could not, in good conscience, recommend it to someone who is not utterly obsessed with the show. I may be a little obsessed myself. After all I bought all seven seasons on DVD, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,33,37,4,65,51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-859","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-c-3","category-essays","category-non-fiction","category-rated","category-tv-criticism","category-tv-tie-in"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/859","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=859"}],"version-history":[{"count":27,"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/859\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1162,"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/859\/revisions\/1162"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/treefell.com\/transmission\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/10\/2130611-L-99x150.jpg\" "\\"Coffee")
<\/span>This book collects a very unimpressive selection of essays about the TV show The Gilmore Girls.
\nI could not, in good conscience, recommend it to someone who is not utterly obsessed with the show.
\nI may be a little obsessed myself. After all I bought all seven seasons on DVD, the soundtrack CD, this rubbish ebook and I’ve read countless message board posts and reams of fan fiction.
\nActually, having written that down, it appears that I’m definitely obsessed with the Gilmore Girls.
\nSo rather than spend any more time talking about “Coffee At Luke’s”, I’m going to follow the book rating with an essay on the show. It’s a long one.\n<\/p>\n
\nSeven days and seven full seasons later I came up for air. It was an experience unlike any other in my life. I watched the show compulsively; episode after episode, disc after disc. I missed meals, I barely slept. I only left the house when I ran out of food or to buy more DVDs of the show.
\nRoughly three months and several complete watches later I’m finally not thinking about the show in idle moments and no longer spending every night watching the show.
\nI’m writing this essay is to put my intense reaction to the show in context and pull together some ideas I’ve had about serial TV over the last few months.
\nTo give you a bit of background – The Gilmore Girls is an American TV programme created by Amy Sherman-Palladino and starring Lauren Graham and Alexis Bledel that ran for seven years, starting on the WB and finishing up on the CW – two minor networks.
\nThe story is about Lorelai Gilmore (Graham) and her daughter Rory (Bledel). The pair are exceptionally close; best friends first, mother and daughter second.
\nIn the pilot we join the girls as Rory, just before her sixteenth birthday, wins a place at an elite prep school. She’s an exceptional student and is looking to improve her chances of fulfilling her lifelong dream of studying at Harvard.
\nUnable to meet the substantial up front costs of tuition with her wage as manager of The Independence Inn Lorelai reaches out, against her better instincts, to her very wealthy and very much estranged parents for a loan. Her mother, Emily (Kelly Bishop) wanting active involvement in the girls lives, puts strings on the loan obligating Lorelai and Rory to attend family dinners every Friday night.
\nFrom here the events of the series unfold. Key plots include the story of Lorelai’s unhappy relationship with her parents, Rory’s growing closeness with her grandparents – particularly her grandfather Richard (Edward Herrmann), the girls dealing with the world of privilege that Lorelai rejected and Rory has to adapt to at her new school, the girl’s love lives as Rory begins to date and Lorelai tries to find the right man, and also Lorelai’s efforts to start her own business and Rory’s journey to college.
\nThe Gilmore Girls is set in picture postcard version of Connecticut, primarily in the girl’s tiny hometown of Stars Hollow and occasionally in the city of Hartford (home of Richard and Emily and Rory’s school). This is a world of intense personal drama but little physical danger. The Gilmores are beautiful, intelligent, spirited, compassionate and steeped in pop culture and yet somehow they still feel like real people.
\nThe Gilmore Girls is not without weaknesses but the strengths make it very much worth watching. The acting of the principal cast is always good and often inspired. Lauren Graham in particular is consistently brilliant; delivering performances worthy of the major awards nearly every episode.
\nThe dialogue, while stylised, is frequently brilliant and comes across as somehow natural even when the rapid delivery of the wordy scripts should prevent that. The rapport between the characters seems utterly genuine. The banter between Lorelai and Rory, talking a mile a minute, each absolutely tuned the other’s wavelength is my favourite part of the show and if you told me that Graham and Bledel weren’t good friends during the making of the show I’d be astonished.
\nThe soundtrack is another strength. From Sam Phillips’ unique incidental music to the choice of songs it colours the show to excellent effect. It’s just alternative enough to stand out on a network TV show and having Grant-Lee Phillips turn up every so often certainly appealed to me – I’ve been a fan since Fuzzy came out.
\nPalladino’s ability to handle the major arcs and story transitions over the seasons proved a huge positive for the show. Nearly every show that takes characters from high school to college struggles (including personal favourites like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Veronica Mars) but it feels seamless when it happens at the start of season four. The nerve with which they handled the “will-they-wont’-they” of Luke (Scott Paterson) and Lorelai, waiting four full years to put them together, was very impressive.
\nIn a TV landscape populated by unreal beauty Lauren and Alexis may the most believable beautiful TV mother and daughter pairing of all time. Each possessing movie star looks, but they actually look like they could be related (their eyes!) but they aren’t dressed like clothes horses nor are they purely eye candy – they dress and feel like real people.
\nIt’s a pity that many of these strengths were abandoned in the last three years, substantially weakening the show.
\nThe lead characters lost all nuance and sense of humour, and the girls start to dress in a fashion beyond their purported means. Feisty Lorelai is reduced to a caricature of a ditzy doormat, moaning about the slow collapse of her relationship. Rory is suddenly an emotionally brittle snob acting without forethought and rushing into a headlong embrace of money and privilege.
\nThe slow, careful build up of Luke and Lorelai’s romance is wasted as the producers do everything to put obstacles in their way and eventually break them up.
\nAt first viewing seasons 5-7 are perfectly good, but when you watch the episodes again you begin to notice that it’s only the sheer charisma of the actors and the quality of the performances that is holding up the entire edifice.
\nThe greatest annoyance is the absolute and total lack of regard for continuity and consistency. The writers change back stories, alter motivations, abilities and the emotional traits of every character on a whim if it will generate drama, if it serves a joke or will help drive a plot. The number of occasions where you face unrealistic inconsistent behaviour on the part of beloved characters is just ridiculous.
\nI could quite happily go off on a long rant about the things that bug me, both big and small, in terms of this problem with the show but I’ll save you from that this time…
\nThe next issue that I have is with the handling of the core relationships in the show. They were quite deliberately set up to be a source of plot and drama, and for a little while it seemed like they were going to service an emotional arc too. The primary example is the relationship between Lorelai and Emily. This is pretty much the most broken and dysfunctional dynamic in the show. It seems, in the early seasons, that the two are gradually going to come to some sort of resolution and settle around a working, if not easy, rapport. Then every single bit of growth is wiped out the second the producers need more drama to drive the show. After the things that they do to each other how could this mother-daughter relationship continue in any fashion? The writers make it plain that Emily longs for an intimate connection with her daughter yet they turn her around and have her be controlling and interfering at every possible opportunity. Lorelai desperately wishes her mother could understand her better and yet does everything in her power to shut her out of her life and behaves in the most childish fashion when called on to support Emily.
\nLorelai and Richard have a messed up relationship, yet she’s obviously a Daddy’s girl and many of their problems stem from his being distant due to his obsession with work – they seem like they could get past those issues but it never happens (one comment in the show’s finale is not a working relationship).
\nOne of my great bugbears is Christopher (Rory’s father, played by David Sutcliffe). As far as I’m concerned these two would barely be friends if it weren’t for the accident of Rory’s conception. Yet they are sold as star-crossed lovers, with Lorelai breaking engagements and behaving in a self-destructive manner, in the hope of them getting together and settling down with their daughter as the perfect American family. In what I regard as a total betrayal the producers in season 7 married the pair off for a while, the only saving grace in that plotline was that it finally removed him as a romantic interest when they divorced.
\nAs for Rory’s boyfriends – for a careful, considered and highly intelligent individual she sure does fall for jerks. Rory has Daddy issues of her own and every one of the men she’s with over the course of the show could be a junior version of Christopher and they are as bad for her as he is bad for Lorelai.
\nEven before Amy Sherman-Palladino was unceremoniously removed as show runner it seemed that the producers had lost interest in their characters, however a great deal of what broke the show is the system that produces serial TV. It seems to me that there are two essential types of long form serial TV that are commonplace today. The soap and the novel. Novels are rare beasts like The Wire and tend to crop up on pay TV channels like HBO or AMC where the creators have control and time to lay out their vision in a coherent fashion.
\nSoaps are what happens on traditional networks where everything is ratings driven. Producers are always focused on what gets ratings for now so they can keep making the show, lucky to be able to think in terms of the season ahead. As an online acquaintance noted about the UK version of Being Human – things happen on a season by season basis. New elements are introduced ad hoc each series to provide enough plot to drive the year, these elements are typically never even hinted at in earlier series and that leaves the world feeling as if it’s been made up as it goes along. This has led even great shows to become more like collections of story arcs and not make sense when taken as a whole – even favourites of mine like Battlestar Galactica, Veronica Mars and Buffy.
\nThe other key feature that makes a series a soap is that in this quest for ratings the producers and writers will do anything to generate drama – sometimes at the expense of consistency (as noted above) and the integrity of the show.
\nNow admittedly this is exacerbated when these shows are watched as box sets over a short period of time and I have to recognise that they are designed to be watched over the course of months and years and not in binges, but that doesn’t excuse the more egregious lapses of continuity.
\nI guess in the end I feel like Gilmore Girls is broken because it ended up as a soap. The quality of acting and dialogue belong to a novel – a coherent piece where things are resolved and characters are allowed to remain complex and grow as time passes. I wish I could watch the alternate world version of the show where it was allowed to fulfill it’s potential – to have the emotional resonance of good literature.
\nThe question I keep asking myself is: why did I fall so hard for The Gilmore Girls?
\nPartly because it’s a warm, safe world to escape to.
\nPartly because no matter how much I desperately wanted it to all add up to something meaningful and watched it over and over trying to figure it out – it’s just inherently broken.
\nUltimately though the main reason I got obsessed was because I developed a huge crush on the character of Lorelai Gilmore.
\nThis was not something I expected. From my initial dalliances with the show I had assumed that I would identify with, and root for, Rory. As I watched I realized I was finding Lorelai utterly sympathetic, entirely loveable and her mixture of traits only became more appealing with each episode.
\nI can’t say that my obsession with The Gilmore Girls was terribly healthy, but I don’t regret it by any manner of means. I got too much pleasure from watching the show.
\nWhat I take away from it is that it’s not the best idea to devote 18 hours every day for seven days to binging on a TV series. Nor is it the best idea to develop a crush on a fictional character.
\nThe best lesson is perhaps that any obsession is exhausting. I’m so glad that it’s finally subsiding into fond affection.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"