'Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life' (mostly) succeeds

In this instance, John Oliver is right

One of the hottest trends of our strange popular culture age is the "revival." A revival is a long-awaited sequel to a long-dormant pop cultural property that returns, to varying extents, the principal contributors to that property who made it popular in the first place. Indeed, usually the involvement of some, most, or, sometimes, even all of these people, on- and off-camera, becomes both a prerequisite for the revival's happening at all, and one (but not the only) measure of that revival's success. 

The most difficult trick these revivals have to pull off is twofold: They have to recreate the often-ineffable qualities that attracted fans to the property in the first place; and, even harder, they have to justify themselves, rebuff accusations of cash-grabbing and prime-passing. Recent revivals have achieved varying degrees of success at this: I thought Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens passed all of these tests, while the recent X-Files revival did not.

Last Friday, Gilmore Girls threw itself into the revival fray with Gilmore Girls:A Year in the Life, now on Netflix. As an unabashed male fan of Amy Sherman-Palladino's story of the relationship between a young mother (Lauren Graham's Lorelai Gilmore) and her daughter (Alexis Bledel's Rory), I broke with my long-standing, self-imposed ban on binge-watching to watch all four of the show's 90-minute, season-centric episodes (summer-to-fall) while I was home over Thanksgiving Break with my family (my sisters being the ones who turned me on to the show in the first place). Judged by the criteria I set out above, A Year in the Life excelled at recreating the overall impression that made fans love the show in the first place, but its narrative was less impressive in justifying the show's restart after a near-decade absence. 

I'll start with what I'll call the show's "atmosphere," for lack of a better term, for that's what A Year in the Life does best. As I said above, it often can be hard to describe or identify what exactly makes a pop culture object great in the first place. Gilmore Girls is no exception. But as a fan of the original show, I can begin to suggest some of the concrete items that, taken together and imbued with an ineffable quality of Gilmore Girls-ness, "make" the show: the quaint and fully-realized New England town of Stars Hollow; its quirky residents; fast, reference-and-joke-laden conversations; the occasional sly social commentary; believable relationships among the main cast; a knack for evoking autumn that rivals Over the Garden Wall in its power; and much else (I go into greater detail about some of these things here). A Year in the Life has all of these things in spades*. This shouldn't be much of a surprise, since the show returned not only virtually every major actor from the original series (even if it had to force some of them in via contrived and artificial means**, and others for split-second cameos), but also creator Palladino, who left the show for its last original run season. A Year in the Life successfully recaptured that ineffable Gilmore Girls-ness fans of the show love.

There is definitely some Gilmore Girls-ness in the original series' title screen

 The journeys of the Girls themselves, unfortunately, were a bit less impressive. By far the best arc of A Year in the Life belongs to Emily Gilmore (the seemingly-ageless Kelly Bishop), who basically becomes a primary character in the revival, whereas she hovered on the edge of secondary in the original. I mention above that the revival returned virtually every major actor from the original series. One of the only people who did not return to A Year in the Life did not decline by choice (presumably), but on account of his untimely demise. I speak of the late, great Edward Herrman (d. 2014), who, in the original series, played Richard Gilmore, Emily's wife, Lorelai's father, and Rory's grandfather.

The revival does not ignore his passing; it, instead, rightly makes Richard's death a major factor in the story. Naturally, it affects Emily most of all. Alone for the first time in 50 years, she finds herself adrift ("It's like a part of me is gone," she laments to Lorelai). She copes in some strange but understandable ways. In the end, she decides to leave the house in which she and Richard lived, as well as -- in an incredible scene -- the staid, elitist historophilia of the Daughters of the American Revolution (as the show depicts them, anyway). She exchanges them for a house in Nantucket and a volunteer position at a whaling museum, where we already see her regaling schoolchildren with visceral tales of whale murder. She alone comes out of this revival with an arc complete enough that fans know she will be content enough for the rest of her days, even if we never see her again on screen.

Emily Gilmore, in her element

Lorelai has a less satisfactory but still complete enough journey over A Year in the Life. Her arc is mostly of the mid-life crisis variety (though her character would deny that she is anywhere close to mid-life, or anywhere near old enough to have such a crisis). After hemming and hawing for virtually the entirety of the original series, she has finally settled down with (but not married) Stars Hollow diner owner, gruff-yet-lovable Luke Danes (Scott Patterson). Her inn is going well, her life in the town seems fine, etc. The drama emerges when she has to work out some still-unresolved issues with her mother that her father's death uncovered, when a classic "what are we?" conversation with Luke leads to some life-questioning places, when her inn undergoes some growing pains (with a treasured staffer threatening to leave), and when she has to deal with the perpetually-undecided Rory (about whom more below). The first three of these plotlines resolve well enough; the last, well...

...the last seems content to remain unresolved, because, well Rory. Rory, Rory, Rory. When last we saw Rory, she was off to cover the 2007-2008 Obama presidential campaign for the Boston Globe. 9 years later, she is...still an "aspiring" journalist, desperately making pitches*** and looking for jobs to fund her itinerant, wanderlust lifestyle. And, most disappointing, she is still in a fling with Logan Huntzberger (Matt Czuchry), a rich jerk Rory can't seem to stop debasing herself for, even though he is engaged and soon to be married and totally not right for her (#TeamJess). In the first few episodes, as Rory continued to jet back and forth between New York and London, it seemed to me that the whole show had been made great again, but Rory's jet-set, wannabe-elitist lifestyle was...off (it doesn't help that she's just not a very good journalist).

Perhaps fulfilling my expectations, Rory does end up back in Stars Hollow more permanently. There, things started feeling better for her character. I think what was wrong with Rory's journey at first was not, as some claim, that the show refuses to let Rory transform into the kind of young journalists who like to write about Gilmore Girls and get paid for it. Contrary to that article I linked to, I think what the revival shows is that Rory belongs in Stars Hollow, with Jess (Milo Ventimiglia), and, most important, her mother, however long she has spent denying it. There's nothing wrong with being rooted in a place, especially your hometown, and especially if your hometown is as beautiful and wonderful as Stars Hollow.    

I would love to experience a Stars Hollow autumn

Those who have watched the revival in full know, however, that it does not simply end with Rory back in Stars Hollow. For the sake of those who have not, I shan't reveal how it ended, or what its last words were. I shall simply say that these words both dramatically change the nature and direction of the series...and practically demand that it continue in some form. That the revival did this points to one of the other main characteristics of revivals, one that may as well take the form of a question: When do you stop? The whole point of these continuations is to bring back characters and worlds we know and love, to revisit and to reacquaint ourselves with them. But that can't go on forever. And doing it at all basically requires you to bring characters out of a sort of stasis implied by temporary non-existence, and to introduce some kind of drama or dissatisfaction in their lives once again, just so that we can enjoy the privilege of seeing it resolved before they enter stasis once more. I am incredibly skeptical of sweeping statements that use TV and movies as evidence, but our popular culture's obsession with revivals may be a function of our larger inability to let go.

At any rate, my final judgment of Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life places it somewhere between The Force Awakens and The X-Files on the recent revival scale, probably more toward the former than the latter. I am definitely happy it happened. And I hope we get more. Someday, there won't be anymore Gilmore Girls. Until then, though, oy with the poodles already!****

*In terms of social commentary, I particularly enjoyed the digs on coffee place wi-fi and unemployed Millennials.
**Did anything about Paris Geller's (Liza Weil) original series run suggest that she would be in charge of a fertility clinic, for example? Maybe something did, and I'm just forgetting it.
***As a part-time journalist, I found some of this very relatable.
****I thought these were going to be the last words of the revival. I was mistaken.