“Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life” has its many ups and downs. The intro is emotional, the flashbacks to Edward Hermann’s stunning performance as Richard Gilmore are aching. There are some incredible scenes between Kelly Bishop (Emily Gilmore) and Lauren Graham (Lorelai). The heart wrenching scene between Lorelai and Luke in their kitchen made me cry. It was a callback to a series that owns so much of my soul, and for that I was so grateful. It was a modernized, wonderful portrait of a cult classic.
Even amongst its many amazing aspects, there remained innumerable flaws: the excessive town musical sequence; the Life and Death Brigade’s montage; the running gag about Rory’s lovably forgettable boyfriend, Paul. In order to dissect every piece of the revival, I would have to spend well over a thousand words, and I don’t have the time nor the emotional wherewithal for that.
Therefore, I think the greatest tragedy of “Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life,” and the aspect upon which I will devote this, is the stagnancy of Rory’s (Alexis Bledel) life. Her world exists exclusively in this cruel, cyclical snow globe of Stars Hollow – the dreams she once had, that once gave her drive and ambition and purpose, are thrown to the wayside. Even as she tries to escape and live a “vagabond lifestyle,” she fails miserably and returns sulkily to her childhood bedroom for little purpose. As we see in the revival, Rory is arguably unsuccessful in her life; she’s thirty-two years old, and yet she has one single piece in the “New Yorker” that has generated a lot of buzz, and at an interview with “GQ” she can barely come up with three accomplishments she has made in her field. When she interviews with a website she has no real interest in pursuing, a website that she believes is “below her,” she doesn’t have a single idea to pitch to her potential boss.
This is incredibly disheartening, to see a girl that we have all grown up with, a girl whose brilliance and passion were palpable even through our television screens, simply drop off. She fails. She moves home. And not a soul questions her. Her mother was the one who suggested she go after the aforementioned website, even citing that since they’re “obsessed” with her, it’ll be good for the self-esteem. She doesn’t encourage her daughter to seek more, to pursue higher, to make herself better; she doesn’t fight her when she moves back home, a scenario starkly resembling Rory dropping out of Yale and moving into her grandmother’s pool house. No one tries to tell her that she needs to get to work, to find a job or a passion. There is an entire group in Stars Hollow of thirty-somethings who have lost their jobs and moved back home. Although it’s a gag, it’s still portrayed as something relatively condoned, because even as Rory places herself above that group, she still holds a strong semblance to them.
“A Year in the Life” attempts to show the ways in which the characters, but most specifically the Gilmore women, overcome the feeling of being stuck in their lives, and this is mildly successful in some of the cases. In Rory’s, however, they instead show us a tale of privilege; Rory was never entitled to her success, and nor were we as an audience, however there should have been a degree of effort made in order to fix the situation we see her lamenting time and time again. She claims she “isn’t back” in Stars Hollow, even after declaring she’s moving back in, but she makes no moves to alter her situation. Her brief stint at the Stars Hollow Gazette presents an opportunity for greatness, for her to branch out and expand and get back to her home roots, and yet she does nothing with it. It fades into the background and isn’t mentioned again the rest of the miniseries. This doesn’t show any development in Rory, nor does it present positive growth or change. It’s a regression.
Rory should have been able to learn from the mistakes she made when she was in high school and college, times where doing the wrong thing are the standard and are necessary in order to grow up. Therefore, Rory hitting rock bottom was integral to her character, and for the audience. She was always lauded as the “perfect child,” the angel daughter in comparison to her hellion of a mother. But Rory is human. She’s imperfect, flawed and convoluted. So while the scenario into which she was thrust was perfectly acceptable for a moment, she shouldn’t have been allowed to stay there. She needed someone to tell her, “You can do better than this. You can be better than this.” But instead, she lived in her childhood bedroom, she became a replica of her mother.
Sherman-Palladino missed so many incredibly opportunities to show growth for this character. She could have had Luke sit Rory down and tell her that he’s so proud of her, but that she needs to do more. She could have had Lorelai and Rory hash out this “perfect daughter” trope that was obviously no longer applicable, and honestly existed as more of a detriment, in Rory’s life. She could have had Jess tell Rory that he knows what it’s like to work for something, to pull yourself together from the ground up, and that she is simply giving in to the easy way out.
The message “A Year in the Life” sends about growth, migration and change are important. It tells you that you don’t have to know what you’re doing in your life at any stage, that you will still find yourself along the way. With Emily and Lorelai, it manages this incredibly well – two powerful, strong women branching out and finding themselves and being more than they were before.
But where is Rory? Rory is her mother’s prop, her cheerleader and her supporter. She doesn’t grieve Richard; she doesn’t have an active role in her mother’s life; she is barely in one place long enough to have any real storyline, and when she does, it’s simply an echo of her mother’s from so many years ago. She is a vagabond that lives off of other people’s generosity and is still so privileged that she can’t comprehend why her mother would deny her something she “has to do,” which includes writing about her mother’s life.
And it breaks my heart, because after everything, I love Rory Gilmore. I see so much of myself in her, and I always did; she was someone to whom I looked up, someone by which I measured myself. She was the one who was kind and passionate and who placed everyone else above herself, the one whose one dream was to go to Harvard and then become an international correspondent and was bound and determined to achieve both of those things. She was the one who wanted to be more, who was always destined to be more than that tiny town that took her and her too-young mother into its loving arms. I was so proud of her for all of her ambition and her drive, for the role she created for so many young girls like myself. But the revival (and, honestly, the later season of the initial show’s run) tarnished that image. Not because Rory suddenly became imperfect, because that was something that was absolutely necessary to create a nuanced and complex character, but rather because she lost the strong sense of self, the her that I had grown so close to over the years. She became a stranger in her own life, a mere shell of the little girl from the first few seasons, and that was incredibly disappointing.
For all of its whims and charms, the one manner in which the revival fails is going back to its roots: the Gilmore girls. The show was big and boasting, colorful and excessive. But it forgot that the epitome of this show has, and always will be, the women at the center. It should have been about the relationships between mothers and daughters, about how together and apart they must grow and develop and change. The ending could have stayed the same, but it would have fit so much better and would have felt so much more Gilmore if the entire four-episode arc had been about the women in the same manner the ending was: the Gilmore girls, sitting alone on the gazebo in Stars Hollow. Alone, and scared, but together. That’s what the show was always about to begin with.
