It all started with this list, this incredible list of books read by Rory Gilmore over the course of the Gilmore Girls series run. I found it about a month ago while stumbling through the internet. It piqued my interest in the show. A show I was always vaguely aware of but never really paid too much attention to. I knew it was there in the TV with fast talking characters, high school misadventures, and boy troubles. I just never watched it. The list prompted me to delicately dip me toe into the first season, testing the Gilmore Girls waters. Before I knew it I had fallen in and come down with a sickness, a Gilmore Girls sickness from which I still have not found a cure. I CAN’T STOP WATCHING! Every day I sit down telling myself I’m just going to watch one episode before bed but one episode turns into three turns into me finally passing out at one in the morning.
I’m sorta bummed that I missed the show as it was airing. I’m actually quite shocked that it lasted for 7 seasons and on the WB no less. The pop culture references are insane. Multiple Manson family jokes are made over several episodes and several seasons. It’s smart and funny and tho it can be a little silly and sappy at times it’s quite refreshing. It isn’t plot after plot of after school specials like so many network TV shows which seem to be trying to teach you a lesson. Teen-aged characters always stay virginal and sober. It ‘s only their friends that stray from these virtues and then meet with horrible consequences; pregnancy, drunk driving accidents, date rape, stern lectures. Rory and her friends got drunk, had sex, and picked the wrong boyfriends with the kind of consequences that actually happen to real life girls. Sometimes shit worked out and sometimes– not so much, but they always did their best and moved on thru life.
I love the silly little town of Stars Hollow with all its wacky characters and I love that all of them add to the fabric of the show. It reminded me a lot of the town of Cicely, Alaska in the series Northern Exposure where all of the characters big or small where important to the show and sometimes more interesting than the main characters. And holy crap the guest stars! Not one but two actresses from Twin Peaks, Mädchen Amick and Sherilyn Fenn (who shows up twice as two different characters). Jon Hamm is there pre-Mad Men looking just as handsome. Sebastian Bach has a regularly recurring guest role as the guitar player in Lane’s band. Madeleine Albright shows up in a dream sequence and Traci Lords as an interior decorator. Even Carole King, writer of the theme song
is in a handful of episodes. The guest star that almost knocked me out of my chair tho was Norman-Fucking-Mailer writer of Pulitzer Prize-winning nonfiction book, The Executioner’s Song. The exhaustive story of the infamous Gary Gilmore, the first person in the United States executed since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976. Holy crap WB, how’d you swing that?
