TV REVIEW: Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life – Winter

Here we are once again. It’s the return of another cult TV show. Whenever this happens there’s always what I like to call the Schrodinger’s Phantom Menace period. See, we all love Gilmore Girls (or else why are you reading this?), and we’ve all been clamoring for it to come back since it’s cancellation back in 2007. But what if it sucks? I mean, the X-Files revival kind of sucked, and 2016 has been a truly sucky year. Until we actually saw what Netflix had done with House Gilmore, anything could have been in the box. It was both great and terrible at the same time.

Which is why, fellow Gilmorites(?), it is my honour to tell you Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life does not suck. Relieved? Well, I’ve got some even better news for you: the new Gilmore Girls is exactly as good as it was before. Its first episode, Winter (one of four feature length installments centred around the four seasons of the year, which comprises this revival), feels almost intentionally designed to remind fans why they loved the show.

Make a list

If you so wish, grab a pen and paper and scribble down a checklist of all the small things that made you love the Gilmore Girls and Star’s Hollow. Mother and Daughter team Lorelai and Rory’s fast paced back and forth frothing with references to literature and pop culture? Check. It’s literally the first scene in the episode, encompassing everything from Les Miserables to Zoolander 2. The random town troubadour who plays incidental music all the time? Check. Local diner owner Luke grumbling at Town Selectman Taylor? Check. The whole thing feels like revisiting your home town after years away (if you actually liked your home town, of course).

The success of Winter may fall squarely on the writing and direction of Amy Sherman-Palladino. The show’s creator and writer returns here for the first time since season six and immediately finds familiar yet interesting new ways to utilise its extensive clan of characters. Not everyone set to return shows up here, but those that do don’t just make a cursory cameo, they have new stories to tell.

Rory and Lorelai naturally act as the episode’s centre, as we begin to find out where they are in their lives. Lorelai is with Luke, the question of whether they’re going to finally have a kid lingering in the air. Depending on where this leads in the rest of the revival, this could bring the show full circle. In the meantime, it’s interesting to see this aspect of the Lorelai-Luke relationship explored. It’s new, and I trust Sherman-Palladino knows where it’s going.

The last time we saw Rory, she was leaving to cover Senator Obama’s presidential election campaign for a political blog (aww, 2007, how quaint). Now she’s a jet setting journalist with so many cell phones she keeps forgetting she has a boyfriend. Because naturally you can’t have Rory without her having boy drama (yes, if you’re wondering – that is a sentence I never thought I’d write). Mostly, Rory flits in and out, having moved out of her New York apartment, shipping all her stuff in boxes to her family and friends. She’s also writing a biography of a famous British woman (played by Doctor Who’s Alex Kingston) and will most likely realise she’s in over her head before finally pulling off a brilliant manuscript.

I would also be remiss not to mention the story of the third and oldest Gilmore girl: Lorelai’s mother Emily. With the death of actor Edward Herrmann, who played Emily’s Husband and Lorelai’s father Richard, the show was left with a tough choice. In the end, Sherman-Palladino decided to honour Herrmann’s role in the show by acknowledging Richard’s passing. Smartly though, Winter tackles this in a way that gives Emily Gilmore a new story to chew on. As she mourns her husband, her control of the Gilmore mansion slowly slips away. At one point, she even employs the extended family of her Hispanic housekeeper to rid the house of all her possessions. There’s a lot to unpack here, but it lead to some powerful scenes between her and Lorelai, along with a humorous cliffhanger on which to end the episode.

Too familiar?

Like I said, every familiar character here has something going on and that extends to the minor ones. Remember Rory’s type-A school friend Paris? She’s a terrifyingly successful doctor running the ‘largest fertility and surrogacy clinic in the western hemisphere’. There’s also town official Taylor, who’s trying to get Star’s Hollow to invest in a full sewer system and local oddball Kirk attempting to start a rideshare company that’s definitely not called Uber. As I write this I realise just how mundane and trivial all this must sound to someone not familiar with the show, but I wonder if that might be an accident of design.

Because the problem with designing a revival to uniquely appeal to long term fans is that few outsiders are likely to know who’s who and what’s going on. If Winter has a major flaw this is it. I loved the hell out of it, right down to the references to coffee and snow that would only make sense to Gilmore Girls veterans. But if Netflix were hoping to use this to keep regular subscribers entertained they might not be getting the show they wanted.

Starting Winter by diving straight into the whimsical back and forth that became a centrepeice of the show, Sherman-Palladino clearly made a decision. Could she have built a script that might have attracted new fans? Maybe. Would it have been as good as the one she delivered? Probably not. That’s the thing about revivals; trying to draw in new viewers can often lead to wonky writing and tedious exposition.

So let’s say this: based on Winter, if you liked Gilmore Girls before you’ll more than likely fall in love with the revival once again. The writing is as good as ever, the performances of Lauren Graham as Lorelai and Alexis Bledel as Rory are still impossibly charming and the wacky world of Star’s Hollow is as quirky as ever. It’s like putting on a comfortable pair of slippers. If you’re new to the show, however, you’re going to have serious trouble understanding the stakes of the story.

Stay tuned for further Gilmore Girls reviews.