THE END GAME
‘Gilmore Girls’ reboot should be its final chapter
ilmore Girls: A Year in the Life” was a decade in the making. Anticipation for the Netflix revival was feverish. Its “final four words” achieved folkloric pop-culture status even before the series dropped last Friday.
After binging all four chapters, I’m happy to report that “Gilmore Girls” has done the sequel right.
“A Year in the Life” proved a charming bit of fan service, in the best possible way, particularly by not trying to make an updated version of Lorelai (Lauren Graham) and Rory’s (Alexis Bledel) mother-daughter story for “a new generation of fans.” To enjoy this reboot meant possessing seven seasons of “Gilmore Girls” history to appreciate all its sly cameos and inside references.
A pivotal reason for “A Year in the Life’s” success is the involvement of series creator Amy ShermanPalladino, who likely dreams in “Gilmore Girls” banter. She exited the series over a contract dispute before its final season on The CW (2006-07), denying fans the ending she’d been planning for years. Every “Gilmore Girls” actor I talked to in recent weeks said that they signed on to the revival without hesitation — knowing that Amy and coexecutive producer (and husband) Dan Palladino wrote and directed each episode. And all the stars returned (even Melissa McCarthy, though only for a scene).
Stars Hollow, that Connecticut snowglobeof-a-town, remains mostly untouched by time, allowing us to seamlessly pick up our sense of place. “A Year in the Life” noted the passage of time without dwelling on it: Luke (Scott Patterson) has wi-fi at the diner, but in true curmudgeon fashion, refuses to give out the password to his freeloading customers. Town jackof-all-trades Kirk (Sean Gunn) unironically launches a ride-sharing service called Ooober, because of course he does.
The town may look the same, but the characters, importantly, have changed. They’re dealing with complicated struggles — the death of a family member, a stalled career, a relationship in a rut. And no development is more shocking than those “final four words”: Rory: Mom? Lorelai: Yeah? Rory: I’m pregnant. The baby’s father is unknown; the most likely bet is Rory’s ex, Logan, but there are other feasible scenarios. I have mixed feelings about the ending. While it’s fitting that a series about three generations of women should end with the announcement of a fourth Gilmore girl (or boy), the general overuse of pregnancy as a narrative device for female characters gets tiring. But if you view “Gilmore Girls” in a vacuum, then sure, it works for this show.
The cliffhanger has spawned inevitable questions of “What’s next?” and Sherman-Palladino and some of its stars have left the door open to making another installment. But does that mean they should? There’s certainly enough material for another season: Rory raising the child, perhaps as a single mother, and her relationship with the child’s father. The effect of this on her budding novelist career. Or a (please, no) new iteration following the youngest Gilmore growing up, a la “Girl Meets World.” It’s easy to see Netflix, having invested a huge sum to revive the franchise, wanting more episodes. But from a purely creative standpoint, “Gilmore Girls” did what it came back to do: give Sherman-Palladino the chance to end her series, on her terms.
A mea culpa: A year ago, I wrote a column in this newspaper bemoaning the forthcoming “Gilmore Girls” revival — chalk it up to millennial cynicism over the many (mostly illadvised) reboots of series from my youth. Happily, “A Year in the Life” proved me wrong. But consider the legacies of “The Sopranos” and “Sex and the City,” two hugely influential TV shows of the past two decades. The former’s fadeto-black ending remains one of the most controversial (and still-talked about) finales in TV history. The latter’s insistence on stretching its story into two movies was an Arabian nightmare.
Ending “Gilmore Girls” on those four cliffhanger words was a bold choice by Sherman-Palladino. How much bolder would it be for her to drop the mic and walk away?