’Gilmore Girls' reboot worth return trip
UNLESS you have a daughter in her twenties, chances are, you have never heard of an American TV series called Gilmore Girls.
But if you do, then you may know why legions of its devoted fans took the day off work last Friday to watch four new episodes as soon as they dropped onto Netflix, nine years after the last season aired.
It is an odd little show in many ways, completely unlike the dark Nordic noir with which we now seem obsessed, or any one of a number of crime series, filled with murder and heart-stopping twists.
But to people who know and love it, Gilmore Girls – or GG, as true fans refer to it – is practically a religion.
The programme, which first aired in 2000, follows the life of Lorelai Gilmore, a young woman who got pregnant at 16 and ran away from her wealthy, overbearing parents to live in a little town in Connecticut with her daughter Rory, who is herself turning 16 when the story begins.
Over the seven original seasons, the Gilmore mother and daughter find their faltering way through the highs and lows of life, tackling their problems as a team.
They were the ultimate duo. More like best friends than a parent and child, they shared everything and seemed to have a special language, peppered with niche cultural references and anecdotes only they could understand.
They were a unique pairing on TV – two clever, funny women talking a mile a minute about the “me too!” things that affected us all.
They were the original “strong women”, but they were not gun-wielding, crimefighting, spandex-wearing super girls.
Rather, they spent most of their time sitting on the sofa or at the kitchen table, eating macaroni and cheese and ice cream, mulling over the big questions in life.
And (the true genius of the show) the minutiae.
It was through watching Lorelai and Rory hash out all of their worries, passions and peeves that the teenage girls who grew up with the show were able to get to grips with their own angst.
They enjoyed the kind of relationship every girl my age wanted to have with her own mum and thought she didn’t – not realising that we had come closer than any generation before us.
In many ways, we had more in common with our mums than they had with theirs.
It must have been hard at times for my grandmother, Irene, who was born in 1919, to relate to my mum, Penny, whom she had rather late in life – 14 years after my uncle – at 42 years old.
Mum, now 55, was a teenager in the ’70s. At 20, mum was pretending to read sociology at university, while spending most of her time going out drinking with her mates or driving to watch my dad play rugby.
When my grandmother was 20, she was driving ambulances in London during World War 2 and waiting for my grandfather to return from serving as a paratrooper so they could elope.
In spite of their vastly different life experiences, Mum and Nanna were very close, though they had a different bond from the one my sister and I are lucky enough to share with our mum now.
In many ways, the Steafel girls have little in common with the Gilmores.
Unlike Lorelai, Mum wasn’t 16 when she had me, for a start. And she didn’t raise me (or my two younger siblings) on her own. But perhaps our relationship hasn’t been so different.
Like most of my girlfriends, I genuinely love spending time with my mum, which is lucky, as I’m back living at home with her and Dad.
We go shopping together, we go on holiday together, we like a lot of the same TV shows and music.
She is always the first person I call, whether it’s to lumber her with a lengthy rant or to tell her exciting news.
No matter how old you are, I imagine every woman has moments when her mother seems a maddening figure who couldn’t possibly understand their life choices.
But as you get older, you realise you’re not so different, after all (something they have known all along).
Some of the most powerful moments in GG are when you catch a flicker of that relationship from both perspectives. In Lorelai, daughters can see how it must feel to be a mother, nervously watching your child stride confidently out into the world; through Rory, mums realise that, beneath the bravado, your notsogirl is probably just as terrified of leaving you.
The new episodes feature a 32-year-old Rory – the same age as her mother was in season one. She is struggling with all the issues we saw Lorelai encounter, while she, in turn, is finding her own path through mid-life.
It felt both fresh but wonderfully familiar and it ended with a stonker of a cliffhanger that has given GG fans hope that there might yet be more in the pipeline. — The Daily Telegraph
● The revival of Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life follows Lorelai, Rory and Emily Gilmore through four seasons of change. Years have passed, but witty banter and popcorn movie nights are eternal.