Twenty-five years ago this month, two highly caffeinated girls made their first appearance on television. Well, girl-women – one a bookish 16-year-old, the other her former 16-and-pregnant mother, the two often blended together into one fast-talking, quick-witted unit. They bantered at 2x speed. They drank cartoonish amounts of coffee – five cups by 8am, if the mother is to be believed. They riffed on everything from Rosemary’s Baby to RuPaul, Jack Kerouac to Britney Spears, West Side Story to Macy Gray. They were the Gilmore girls – Lorelai and Rory, arguably now the most famous and certainly one of the most beloved mother-daughter duos in TV history.
Gilmore Girls, which ran from 2000 until 2007, was not a hit in its time. It never reached a wide audience, won any awards, or got the buzz of its more conventionally dramatic peers. But through word of mouth, DVD swaps, millennial nostalgia and the force of Netflix, the show, created by former Roseanne writer Amy Sherman-Palladino, has become one of the most enduring TV hits of the Y2K era, courting fans born long after it aired. (Between January and June 2023, the first season clocked over 82m views on Netflix, where it has been one of the streamer’s most reliable library series since 2014.) Though a year-round show, its hallmarks – all that coffee, cosy knits, school uniforms – have made it synonymous with autumn, a season that does not exist in Burbank, California, where it filmed on a soundstage for the entirety of its run. Every September, like clockwork, viewers flock to fictional Stars Hollow, Connecticut, putting Gilmore Girls in the top 10 most streamed shows in the US.
Lorelai, played by Lauren Graham, was a Bangles-obsessed Gen Xer, and Rory, played by a fresh-faced Alexis Bledel, was one of the first portraits of a flailing millennial protagonist. Yet the appeal of their bond – steadfast, supercharged, surrounded by small-town New England eccentrics – spans generations, from boomers who might relate to the frequently icy materfamilias, Emily Gilmore (Kelly Bishop), to gen Alpha teenagers drawn to Rory’s coming-of-age struggles. The same goes for the show’s signature rat-a-tat dialogue – a rapid-fire torrent of references and wisecracks. Nothing on TV before or since has nailed the machine-gun rhythm of Gilmore Girls in its prime, so punchy that Graham and co-star Scott Patterson (who played the gruff diner owner Luke) both had to quit smoking to keep up. (The standard Gilmore Girls script ran 20 pages longer than an average hour-long series, and filmed in far less time.)
Like the many beloved ensemble characters of Stars Hollow (pour one out for Miss Patty), Gilmore Girls was always a bit of an oddball. Swift, nimble and uncompromisingly clever, it shared little with the teen dramas popular with its target audience, such as Dawson’s Creek and, later, The OC and One Tree Hill. (Underscoring the show’s status as a diamond in the rough, Adam Brody and Chad Michael Murray both appeared here as early season bit players, before they left for greener pastures.) Unlike the teen soaps, Gilmore Girls focused on quotidian dramas; episodes revolved around Lorelei wearing an inappropriate outfit to a meeting with Rory’s dean, or Rory falling asleep with her boyfriend after a school dance, triggering a full matrilineal meltdown.
In the lane of My So-Called Life, which aired five years prior, Gilmore Girls aimed for emotional realism – the trials and tribulations of grades, boys, friends and prep school, the tangled web of relationships in a small town. I got into Gilmore Girls as a young teenager, poring over the DVDs with my middle school friends, drawn to Rory’s potent mix of relatable awkwardness and aspirational exceptionalism. She was both diffident and driven – unusual for a female protagonist – independent and terribly naive, uninterested in boys until she’s suddenly not (Jess Mariano hive rise). She was an antecedent to millennial shows that more thoroughly dissected their characters’ flaws – particularly Girls, from noted Gilmore Girls fan Lena Dunham – and, for teen viewers, a lovably wide-eyed guide.
Rewatching now, at 32 – the same age as Lorelei in the pilot – I am more fascinated by the show’s scope: a whole town’s worth of memorable characters, mostly women, orbiting around a central maternal lineage. Gilmore Girls was, at its core, about the intricacies of relationships – the ebbs and flows and chemistry and grievances between women, be they friends, such as Lorelei and her perennially sunny bestie Sookie (series breakout Melissa McCarthy), or family.
The show excelled in mining the spiky push-pull out of the Gilmore Girls’ wildly different dispositions – how we love and resent and mirror our parents, how the apple can look so different, yet fall so close to the tree. I return, every now and then, to a sequence from the sixth season – the last written by Sherman-Palladino, who departed with her husband/creative partner Daniel Palladino before the verboten seventh season over contractual disputes – after Rory has dropped out of Yale (girl!), reconciled with Lorelai and agreed to go to a restored Friday Night Dinner at her grandparents. Modelled on a Woody Allen movie, the dinner careens through shouting matches, tipsy conviviality and some of Emily’s most gloriously mean lines in the series (“I only wish I remembered to call her a cocktail waitress!”). The scene plays like a thesis for the show: everyone has a go, everyone gets got, everyone is a little right and a little wrong, much is said and little changes. And all, of course, on hyper-speed.
Time has made the show’s blindspots, on race and LGBTQ+ representation and privilege, more glaring; it is especially obvious to me now how Rory’s exceptionalism was not her intelligence but her opportunities, afforded by rich grandparents and then by a rich boyfriend at an Ivy League school. And Lorelai’s trajectory from runaway teenage mother who found work as a maid to inn manager with a wraparound porch feels ever more like a television fantasy.
But that’s perhaps giving a show famous for its obviously empty prop coffee cups too literal a read. For all its emotional dexterity, Gilmore Girls remains, primarily, a comfort show – nostalgic and chipper, its pitched banter and full diner and flip phones and soundtrack of “la la las” like a warm bath. It offers a fantasy of a small town with small concerns, and an unbreakable mother-daughter bond forged on unconditional love, shared youth, classic films and pancakes. Wherever they lead, you want to follow.
