Stars Hollow, Connecticut, would make a great Twilight Zone setting.
There is something unearthly about the adorable little town. The people are eccentric and hale and smiley – maybe too smiley. It feels cut off from the world – you can barely even get a cellular signal – as if, in the words of Lorelai Gilmore (Lauren Graham), “The entire town was constructed in a giant snow globe.”
But Gilmore Girls, being revived with a four-part miniseries on Netflix, is the opposite of a horror story. It’s a comfort story. For seven seasons, then an afterlife in syndication and streaming, it poured its audience bottomless refills of small-town quirk and the highly caffeinated repartee of Lorelai and her daughter and best friend, Rory (Alexis Bledel).
There’s always the danger, with cultural nostalgia, that sweetness can tip over into something uncanny and eerie. There’s a fine line between celebrating the past and exhuming it.
Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life stays, mostly, on the good side of that line. So many things are much like we remember them: Miss Patty’s ballet studio, the Sam Phillips “la la la”s on the soundtrack, the troubadour in the town square. But it really works because, for all its winks and callbacks and Netflix-y weaponized nostalgia, it also recognizes that things have changed.
A Year in the Life was conceived as a kind of do-over. The creator, Amy Sherman-Palladino, left the original series after six seasons (along with her husband and writing partner, Daniel Palladino) in a contract dispute. Gilmore Girls sputtered on for one tongue-tied final season, but Sherman-Palladino wasn’t there to execute the ending that she had planned down to the series’ last four words.
Though the miniseries does end on those four words, A Year in the Life is not, and can’t be, the final season we never got.
The biggest reminder is a change forced on the show: Edward Herrmann, who played the patriarch Richard Gilmore, died in 2014. His loss becomes the emotional engine of the miniseries, just as the original series was driven by the strain between Lorelai and her grande dame mother, Emily (Kelly Bishop), lingering from when Lorelai became pregnant with Rory at 16.
A Year in the Life begins in early 2016, four months after Richard’s death, which has resurfaced bitter feelings between Lorelai and Emily. Rory, now a peripatetic journalist, comes home to figure herself out, see old friends and walk and talk with her mother through the town’s tourism-brochure-perfect snowscape.
On the surface, little has changed. Luke Danes (Scott Patterson), Lorelai’s old squeeze, is still haranguing the customers at his diner, though now over Wi-Fi abuse rather than cellphone use. The pop-culture references still fly, updated to include Game of Thrones, Outlander and man buns.
But Rory is 32 now, the same age as Lorelai when the series began in 2000. (On one level, the entire miniseries is a “Wanna Feel Old?” listicle.) This is a time-conscious story, down to the structure — four feature-length episodes, one for each season. Rory is feeling her age; Lorelai is feeling her mortality; Emily is feeling both heartbreak and the opportunity to change.
The miniseries is sentimental but not maudlin, and Graham and Bledel quickly fall back into their Tracy-Hepburn comedic rhythm. “Wow. I’m winded,” Rory says after their first verbal tap dance. “Haven’t done that for a while,” Lorelai answers.
There’s more of that self-consciousness, and a parade of “Well hello, you!” cameos. You will likely be indulged no matter whom you consider the best supporting character. (The correct answer, by the way, is Paris Geller, Rory’s former classmate played by Liza Weil, who gets an update that shows off her brittle imperiousness.)
A Year in the Life plays like a six-hour movie in four acts. The format establishes it, like Netflix’s Arrested Development, as something different from the series’ network-TV seasons.
But there’s some bloat, including a Waiting for Guffman-like community musical interlude, featuring Christian Borle and Sutton Foster, that runs 10 minutes and would have been better at 10 seconds. And elements of Rory’s plot feel like they were intended more for a character in her early 20s – as Sherman-Palladino had originally planned – than one in her early 30s.
Mostly, though, A Year in the Life succeeds at recreating the voice of Gilmore Girls, which is what creates the world of Gilmore Girls.
Like Lake Wobegon or Mayberry, Stars Hollow is a wish in the shape of a town, an idyll where everything is low stakes. Townspeople argue, but mostly over things like an international food fair or a proposed sewer system. They have decent, not overly demanding jobs, blue collar and white. Young adults who fail to launch can come home to their parents’ cozy houses (a running joke in one episode). Stars Hollow is not just a safety net, it’s a giant, fluffy featherbed.
Related
- The great Gilmore Girls mystery: What became of the Huntzberger newspaper chain?
- ‘It’s a lifestyle, it’s a religion’: How Gilmore Girls has transcended generations, gender and genre
- The 11 episodes of Gilmore Girls you need to watch before the series returns to Netflix
This is an eternal fantasy, but it’s well timed for the Thanksgiving weekend after an election that has made fractious Emilys and Lorelais of many relatives. (There are few political references beyond a quick allusion to Brexit, but it’s noteworthy that the story wraps in the fall, just as real America is about to head off to the polls.)
In that sense, there is something sinister hiding, Twilight Zone-style, behind its facade of quirky comity: our world. Call Gilmore Girls a bubble or, if you’re a romantic, a snow globe. It’s not a horror story, though, except that in the end the characters get to stay, and the rest of us have to leave.
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