When I first watched Gilmore Girls in the early 2010s -- on DVD, long after it had aired its final episode -- I thought it was the best show I would ever see. My favorite show ever made. (I'm sorry, but This Is Us has long since claimed that spot for me.) I had no one to talk to about it, no online "fandom" to challenge my thoughts on every character, event, and season.
The first time I heard a valid criticism of the show's characters online many years later -- that they were selfish, stuck-up, the epitome of the rich American white woman's experience except with faster talking and no actual cursing until the Netflix revival -- I was shocked. And then I went, "Oh ... they're really not wrong about any of that." And I went through my own journey of figuring out if the show I'd fallen so deeply in love with was really everything I'd once viewed it as.
And of course it's not. It has many of the usual product-of-the-early-2000s TV show problems; jokes that never should have been there, a disturbing lack of diversity in more ways than one; the list goes on. It's also a very narrow-minded view of the world -- again, created and told from the perspective of white women with all the typical issues TV versions of us are known to have.
It took me too long to understand that I loved Gilmore Girls when I was younger because it was made for me and spoke to many of my experiences, dreams, and fears. It took me even longer to realize that this is not the reason I love the show now, nearly 25 years after it first premiered to the public.
Let's focus our attention on the three main Gilmore girls -- Lorelai, Rory, and Emily. They are extremely flawed, often times insufferable characters. They continously fail to learn from their mistakes, they hold grudges, they tend to think they deserve the world when -- let's be honest -- they're not any more deserving than those around them. These are the things that label them as "unlikable" among fans, particularly on TikTok. But what if they seem that way because, unlike so many shows of its era, Gilmore Girls features characters that are as raw and real (and therefore often seemingly unbearable) as our own complicated families and selves?
Sometimes it feels like viewers have come to expect characters on their favorite shows to be exaggerations of real people -- which, in most cases, isn't an unfair expectation. But not every show can or has to be like that. What's so wrong with a mother who treats her daughter so much like a friend that when serious life hurdles arise, they can't handle them like a parent and child? Is it so out of left field for Rory, who had been told all her life that she could achieve whatever she wanted, to go off the deep end the first time someone dared to tell her otherwise?
To be a Gilmore girl is to be human. Messy, selfish, frustratingly so perhaps. But I've always liked that about them. I think I always will.