Vanilla icing on the cupcakes
‘THE whitest show ever.” That’s what somebody on Twitter recently termed US comedy-drama series Gilmore Girls, eliciting a torrent of agreement on all sides. I was intrigued. I never watched the original incarnation of the show, which ended a decade ago. To be honest, I may have at points confused it with The Golden Girls, but we don’t have to get into that.
Late last year Netflix revived Gilmore Girls for four episodes. That’s what I watched to try to assess whether the show’s reputation as a crucible of whiteliness was justified. It opens with snow falling, which made everything look very white indeed. That aside, though, it didn’t take me long to see what people were on about.
Gilmore Girls is about two rich women, apparently linked via a mother-daughter relationship. It is difficult to tell which one is which, since they seem to be separated by about two minutes in age. They live in a town called Stars Hollow, where everyone is zany in some way. There, they spend their days machinegunning conversation at each other on topics which could have been lifted straight from the Stuff White People Like website: Gwyneth Paltrow’s blog Goop; Fitbits; dogs wearing clothes; tap-dance; Ben Affleck.
I’m not exaggerating about how fast they talk. At one stage in my viewing I regained consciousness with a start and realised I had been zoned out for about 10 minutes. There’s a little known speech disorder called “cluttering”, characterised by an extremely rapid rate of speech. Everyone in Stars Hollow appears to be a clutterer. The script for a single episode of Gilmore Girls probably runs to more pages than a public protector report.
Yet there is something about Gilmore Girls that inspires crazy affection among its fans. I recently listened to a podcast where a US Marine sniper described how dedicated his unit in Iraq was to following the show. He said they loved it because it showed a universe so radically different from the war zone they were in. “It’s a really idyllic kind of world, but it’s not super sappy,” he explained. “It still has sarcasm and weirdness that makes the idyllic part of it — the really nice warm part of it — even more palatable and real.”
That made me want to like the show — especially when I heard how the show’s creator, Amy ShermanPalladino, sent the soldiers branded Gilmore Girls jackets after receiving a fan letter from them.
But a few hours into the reboot of the series, I could take it no more. Viewed in a certain light, the show is like comfort food. From another angle, it’s more like being suffocated by a mountain of cupcakes.