Everyone grab your extra-large coffee cups and leave your cell phones at home, because we are all going back to our favorite small town, Stars Hollow. November 25, 2016 marked the debut of the revival for the beloved 2000s “dramedy” Gilmore Girls. The revival, titled Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life follows Rory, Lorelai and Emily Gilmore, exploring how their lives are still changing ten years after the original show left off.
Rory was somewhat of a role-model to her young viewers. How could she not be? She was smart, level headed, ambitious, avoided the “boy crazy” stereotype, and had a kick ass mother/ best friend to boot. When the original show ended in 2007, Rory had just graduated Yale and was about to jump onto the Obama campaign trail as a junior reporter. By all accounts, her life was on the fast track to success, and all of us were rooting for her.
Then the real-world hits.
Ten years later, we find Rory in the middle of a life crisis. She’s homeless, jobless, and then is forced to move right back in with mommy dearest. (Hmm, why does this sound familiar?) Amy Sherman-Palladino deals with a very common reality for our generation in her revival. According to the Wall Street Journal, “almost 40% of young Americans were living with their parents, siblings or other relatives in 2015.” Rory’s rudderless wanderings are supposed to be reminiscent of the same kind of blundering around that some post-graduate millennials do in their mid to late twenties.
Our generation is facing struggles in the job market. Entry-level jobs are hard to come by, and a lot of times we find that we’re even overqualified for others. Rory knows these struggles only too well as she is continually turned down from job after job, yet refuses to accept a position at a blogging site because it’s beneath her. As she begins to realize that sometimes you have to start at the bottom, she begrudgingly agrees to meet with the young founder of the blogging site, only to be turned down (again) because she came unprepared to a job interview. Not surprisingly, the art of the traditional job interview is a skill that too much of the millennial generation doesn’t seem to have mastered. USA Today puts it best, ” Many college grads lack interview skills. They take calls, text and sometimes bring their parents or pets to interviews. HR execs blame a coddled generation weaned on smartphones and social media.”
We had a young, hopeful girl who was determined to do something great in her life. The people around her constantly sung her praises, and believed her to be special and one of a kind. This, per older generations, is the kind of coddling that makes us spoiled, lazy, entitled millennials.
I hate to say that, in the case of Rory Silver-Spoon Gilmore, they were right.
