(September 2006) 'Gilmore Girls' isn't what it used to be

Alan Sepinwall

Tuesday, September 26, 2006
Gilmore Girls

(Tonight at 8 on Channel 11) Lorelai deals with the aftermath of sleeping with Christopher, Rory pines for London-bound Logan, and Taylor's attempt at traffic management goes bad in the seventh-season premiere.

"I woke up one morning and looked around the room. Something wasn't right. I realized that someone had broken in the night before and replaced everything in my apartment with an exact replica! I couldn't believe it. I got my roommate and showed him. I said, 'Look at this -- everything's been replaced with an exact replica!' He said, 'Do I know you?'"

-- Steven Wright

WATCHING the season premiere of "Gilmore Girls," I couldn't stop thinking of that bit of vintage Wright. The show looks the same, the actors are the same, they're behaving in a consistent fashion, and yet... exact replicas.

I suppose that unsettling feeling was inevitable. At the end of last season, "Gilmore" creator Amy Sherman-Palladino and her husband, Daniel, quit because they couldn't agree to new contract terms with Warner Bros. studio. Sherman-Palladino not only created the "Gilmore" characters, she lent them her voice.

Like Aaron Sorkin on "The West Wing," David Milch on "NYPD Blue" and a handful of other over-stimulated writer/producers in network TV history, she either wrote or rewrote the vast majority of episodes. (And Daniel handled the ones she didn't.) Lorelai Gilmore is Amy Sherman-Palladino, give or take a fondness for big hats.

As if new showrunner David Rosenthal weren't already starting at a disadvantage, Sherman-Palladino scorched the earth on her way out. First she spent most of last season pushing popular couple Lorelai and Luke apart though the shark-jumping introduction of Luke's previously-unknown daughter April. Then, in a twist that was as loathed by the fans as it was irreversible, she had Lorelai break up with Luke and go to bed with her ex-boyfriend (and baby daddy) Christopher. Sherman-Palladino said she had hoped to stay and continue the story, but it was hard to watch the finale and not imagine her saying, "Get out of that one, suckers!" (Maybe something wittier; she's the Dorothy Parker fan, after all.)

Sorkin pulled a similar stunt when he was forced off "West Wing," contriving a way to put a Republican in charge of the White House in his last episode. It was a mess that his replacements clumsily tried to wave away in a few episodes, but the emotional fallout lingered over the show for months. Milch, meanwhile, left "NYPD Blue" without bothering to tell any of his successors what Ricky Schroder's deep, dark secret was; their improvised answer was so convoluted and lame that fans were almost relieved when the actor's character was killed off.

It's to Rosenthal's credit that he addresses the Christopher situation head-on. He doesn't make it into a dream, doesn't try to pretend they just cuddled all night, doesn't have Lorelai and Luke make a pact where he has a one-night stand and then they pretend like it never happened. The premiere deals honestly with what happened and how the characters would react to it.

Lauren Graham is so good in the final scene that she would deserve an award for it -- if, that is, Emmy voters weren't so oblivious to her existence that she couldn't even get nominated in a year when the TV Academy introduced a rule change that was nicknamed after her.

The problem is that if Rosenthal and company stay true to the characters, there is no realistic way Luke and Lorelai would get back together by the end of this season, which as of now looks to be the show's last. Luke's greatest fear was always that Lorelai would get back with Christopher; she did it, and if/when he finds out, he is not the type to forgive easily. A quick fix will feel phony; a realistic treatment will deny the fans the happy ending they've been pulling for practically since day one.

So if the dramatic, romantic core of the show is good and thoroughly bollixed, that leaves the comedy. And it's in the quippiness where Sherman-Palladino's absence is most keenly felt.

Rosenthal can write a funny line or 12, definitely. Liza Weil's underused Paris Gellar has a nice scene where she screens applicants for her new SAT prep class; when the mother of a prospective student insists her daughter has such potential, Paris snaps, "So did Charles Manson." And Alexis Bledel's Rory, failing to keep up a brave face after boyfriend Logan's forcible exile to London, goes on a memorable rant about whether the phrase "good-bye" is an oxymoron.

But the comedy half of "Gilmore Girls" has always been more than the sum of its punchlines. What's missing is that machine-gun pace, the sense that Graham and Bledel are always a second away from needing an oxygen mask. The season premiere is noticeably slower and less busy than usual. The Dragonfly Inn's kitchen, usually bustling with activity, now looks like it just got shut down by the health inspector.

"Gilmore" has had sluggish episodes before, but those usually came in the middle of a season, and you could always reassure yourself with the knowledge that the phrase "Written and Directed by Amy Sherman-Palladino" would pop up in an episode's credits in another week or two. That's not going to happen now. Anyone who's lived with this show and its characters for the last six years can see that something has definitely been stolen, even if, to the casual eye, the replacement looks and sounds close enough.

Alan Sepinwall may be reached at asepinwall@starledger.com, or by writing him at 1 Star-Ledger Plaza, Newark, N.J. 07102-1200.

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(September 2006) Gilmore Girls: Season Seven Premiere

by Willa Paskin

When Gilmore Girls begins its 7th season this fall it will do so without its executive producer and creator, Amy Sherman-Palladino. Under her direction Gilmore Girls has been one of the quirkiest, smartest, wittiest and most beloved shows on television, boasting razor sharp dialogue, the fastest banter this side of His Girl Friday, a series of realistic, loving, and fraught mother-daughter relationships, and in, Lorelai Gilmore, perhaps the most fully developed female character on television.

But under Palladino’s direction Gilmore Girls has also been one of the most frustrating and flat-out weird shows on TV, consistently forsaking the major characters and plot development in favor of donating exorbitant amounts of screen time to the peripheral, supremely irritating characters that populate Lorelai and Rory’s quaintly surrealistic hometown, Stars Hollow. Without Palladino, Gilmore Girls will certainly be different… it just might be better.

Throughout her tenure on the show, Palladino has shown herself to be like one of those parents who only doles out three pieces of Halloween candy per kid, and insists that one of those pieces is a small box of raisins. Gilmore Girls’ viewers never get as much of the good stuff as they really want.

Take, for example, this past season’s excruciating finale. Both Lorelai and Rory were involved in season-long story arcs in need of resolution, yet neither dominated the episode. Instead, a third of it was taken up by an immaterial talent show. Stars Hollow’s resident “troubadour”, a fellow who sings on the town’s streets, had been plucked off the corner to open for Neil Young. Hoping to catch such a break, dozens of musicians (including Sonic Youth, Yo La Tengo and 24’s Mary Lynn Rajskub) descended on the fictional town, sending Taylor, Stars Hollow’s persnickety top politico, into a tizzy of speechifying that all this music was bad for business and sleeping. One third of the season finale was taken up by content that could be fast-forwarded without missing a thing about our eponymous girls. Raisins.

Of course, Palladino absolutely loves raisins ("But, sweetheart, raisins are candy!") She’s not trying to show you something you won’t like—she wants to show you something she thinks is absolutely fantastic. Her enthusiasm for this storyline radiated off the screen. The fact that most viewers of Gilmore Girls would probably have rather (no offense to Kim Gordon) seen Lorelai than Sonic Youth doesn’t seem to have mattered very much to Palladino.

Indeed, watching the show, one regularly gets the feeling that giving the audience what they want isn’t very high up on her priority list. Not that Gilmore Girls is in the practice of killing off main characters or even keeping love interests apart. Rather, it’s the whimsies of Palladino’s aesthetic sensibility that dictate the happenings on Gilmore Girls. Palladino is probably a big fan of Yo La Tengo. She wanted them on her show, so they were. Her personal taste trumps all else—which is how you explain not only the season finale, but episode after episode when town meetings and recreations of the American Revolution are all that happen on screen.

But Palladino’s taste also accounts for what’s great about Gilmore Girls, and why it doesn’t feel like any other show on the air. In addition to the annoying, kitschy, time-sucking subplots she throws on the screen, she’s responsible for Lorelai and Rory and Emily, for all their talk, and for of a pace and quality not realistically attainable by unscripted humans, but still magnificent and whirling nonetheless. She’s also responsible creation of this crazy town—a charming setting—if only it wasn’t on screen so damn much.

For all she did wrong in the finale, when Palladino finally got around to tackling the major story lines, she did a bang up job. The episode contained a brief, but intense fight between Luke and Lorelei, the culmination of months of tension. It wasn’t long, it wasn’t thorough, but it was well written, well acted—an enormous, painful release. After endless inaction this three-minute fight carried the emotional weight of an entire episode.

Palladino’s restraint with the show stopping, knock down drag-outs makes Gilmore Girls one of the more realistic shows on television. To speak of realism and Gilmore Girls is a tricky thing, given how patently unrealistic Stars Hollow is. It’s a town out of time, where there’s no fast food or gas stations, everyone is bizarre and involved in each other’s business, and they all gather frequently to stage weird rituals on the town green. It’s a town with a troubadour. And Sally Struthers lives there, too.

But in this strange little town lives a woman who, for all her snappy, snide banter, for all her willingness to bicker, avoids truly painful confrontations with the people she loves for as long as she possibly can-- just like most of us. Lorelai regularly ignores the gaping dysfunctions in her relationships with her mother, boyfriend, and daughter. Those people are in her life for good, everyday doesn’t need to be a scene from World War III.

Delaying emotional confrontations between the main characters makes the episodes where they do occur seem quite dynamic – and other episodes less so. Season after season, Gilmore’s major problem has been one of pacing. Watching many of the episodes before Lorelai and Luke’s fight, or before Lorelai and Rory’s reconciliation after a painful falling out earlier this season, or before the consummation of Luke and Lorelai’s relationship last season, when the writers inexplicably squired him off to a Renaissance fair, was like staring at someone treading water: the show’s not going anywhere, at least not this week. Instead of seeing any forward movement in the plot, you watch Lorelai and Rory participate in some ridiculous town spectacle.

That’s not to say every single episode of Gilmore Girls should involve an enormous fight. If Luke and Lorelai had a heart-to-heart every time they met, their arguments would be meaningless, the show would be maudlin and overly dramatic. Gilmore Girls would be One Tree Hill. It is to say that doling out the right amount of plot to keep viewers from feeling bored without degenerating into a soap opera is a complex balancing act, and it’s not one that Palladino has always managed well.

And it may be one that a new showrunner could do better. Someone who could say, “Ok, so we want Yo La Tengo, but how about we skip Sonic Youth? Or, maybe we can figure out a way to integrate Rory and Lorelai into this troubadour storyline, so it doesn’t feel so unnecessary.” Someone such as this might pay more attention to story flow and not let five or six episodes go by with no development on major fronts. Palladino did the hard work, already; she created people and a place that are distinct and interesting and that viewers care about. But perhaps it’s time for someone who’s a little less quirky sensibility will be able to put together a consistently better television show.

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/tv/reviews/5792/gilmore-girls1/