Gilmore Girls get their say
Rory and Lorelai are back in A Year in the Life
It’s instantly recognizable — call it Gilmore Girls Americana.
“Is that the small-town experience?” Alexis Bledel, star of the original series and new four-part project asked, as co-star Lauren Graham added, “Kind of simple and happy ...”
Now we’ll see how relevant that all feels in 2016, with Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life (each episode encompasses a season of the year), set to debut on Friday.
“I don’t know if it fits today, but I think people maybe appreciate that aspect of it,” Graham said. “And I don’t want reality TV to be our only option, as an actor. So I think there are a number of reasons why the show has stuck around ... There’s something to be said for something you want to watch with a family member or friend, that isn’t too stressful, but still is so intelligent and is really about something.”
The original series aired for seven seasons, from 2000 to 2007. It focused on the lives and relationships of single-mom Lorelai Gilmore (Graham), and her then-teen daughter Rory (Bledel).
Gilmore Girls was a dramedy, even before that term gained traction. But it never got a proper ending.
These days, just about every long-running show that falls into the category of “beloved” gets to have some sort of ending, if the creators want one. But a decade ago, that wasn’t always the case.
“The whole thing was unfinished,” Graham said. “So that, to some degree I think, is why we’re sitting here. It’s not a grab for attention. It’s just that, really, we didn’t get to end the show. In Amy (Sherman-Palladino, series creator and executive producer), and Dan (Palladino, Amy’s husband and also an executive producer), we have people who not only have more to say, they have ‘more more’ to say. She’s like, ‘I can’t even put it all in these four episodes.’
“It’s like anyone who writes a successful character. It’s why Batman is still around. Somebody’s got something else to say about it. And it just happened that the world has evolved in such a way that a place to put it exists (Netflix).”
Bledel said the cast and creators of Gilmore Girls had stayed in touch over the years.
Graham went on to star in Parenthood, which ran for six seasons on NBC. And Bledel did a number of self-described “strange” movie roles to test her boundaries. Her most memorable TV appearance was on Mad Men, where she played Beth Dawes, a disturbed young woman who had an affair with Pete Campbell (played by Vincent Kartheiser, Bledel’s real-life husband).
“Amy and I would talk sometimes, she’d check in with me and see what I was working on,” Bledel said.
“She expressed an interest in taking these characters further, and we talked about different possibilities from time to time. I knew she was interested in a more satisfying conclusion. But not even so much of a conclusion, it was that these characters still were very much alive for her.
“So you can’t ignore someone’s creative impulses when it comes to something like that. We just kept talking about it.”
And here we are, finally, back in the fictional town of Stars Hollow, Conn.
In Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, it doesn’t take long for enduring, endearing, familial, familiar patterns to emerge.