The Gilmore Girls

For a time I was a regular watcher of the WB's (now the CW, or something like that) Gilmore Girls. Initially I was drawn to it because I saw a picture somewhere of Alexis Bledel, who plays the precocious teenage daughter in the show. I quickly learned that Lauren Graham, who plays her mother, was equally as fetching, so the show energized mother-daughter fantasies everywhere.

So I came for the eye candy, but I stayed for the writing. The show was created band written y Amy Sherman-Padillo, who it would appear was nurtured on screwball comedies. The dialogue in this show was frequently amazing, specifically the patter between Graham and Bledel, who both spoke as if they feared the world would end before they finished their sentences. I imagine the scripts were twice as long as a normal one-hour show, because so many bon mots were packed into each hour.

Ostensibly, the show was about a mother who gave birth to her child as a teenager, and became estranged from her snooty parents (deliciously played each week by Kelly Bishop and Edward Hermann). When the daughter turns out to be academically gifted, the mother goes crawling back and asks her parents for tuition help to send said daughter to a prep school. Meanwhile, mother and daughter live in a picturesque New England town that is populated by lovable oddballs.

Last night was the series finale, after seven seasons on the air. I had stopped being a regular viewer, both because during my stretch as a movie-theater worker I was away from the TV set on Tuesday nights, and also the show made a wrong turn when they had Rory (the daughter) fall in with a bad crowd at Yale, and she and her mother stopped talking. Their interplay was the best part of the show, so to have them grumpy with each other was just too much of a downer. It was also somewhat tedious to have the show turn into another "will they or won't they" soap opera, as Graham and hunky diner owner Luke (Scott Patterson) went from friendship to love affair to back again.

I will have fond memories of the show, though. It was great to watch a show that celebrated erudition, and the pop culture references, reaching from the highest to the very low (who will forget the episode where the cast members watch the film version of Pippi Longstocking) were dazzling. The long-form TV series is an interesting art form, because a viewer becomes invested in characters for years at a time, and to see them sign off for good does elicit emotions that a film or book can't duplicate. So long, Lorelai and Rory Gilmore, I wish you both well.