Pilot Talk 2017: The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

Part of Amazon's latest Pilot Season

Amazon's Pilot Season has been around for a few years now and it has proven itself to be a fun new way to conduct the series development process, allowing viewers to have a say in what pilots will be able to become a full series.  (Though it's unclear just how much of a role the user voting has on these matters.)  It can be a frustrating system too.  If you watch a pilot and like it, there's a possibility that it won't get picked up.  And even if it does get picked up, you're bound to wait at least a year to see the rest of the season.  In fact, I'm still waiting for the rest of Whit Stillman's Cosmopolitans, which was picked up in 2014 and still hasn't seen the light of day.  For that reason, I've largely stopped participating in the Pilot Season, preferring to wait for shows to actually get picked up and release a full season before I commit to checking them out.

Of course, I'm willing to make exceptions if a pilot calls for it and one of the biggest exceptions of all appeared this past weekend in the form of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, the latest series from Amy Sherman-Palladino.  I'm a huge fan of Palladino's previous series, Gilmore Girls and Bunheads, so I've been eagerly anticipating Maisel since it was first announced.  The show is set in 1950s New York and follows Miriam "Midge" Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan), a plucky woman settled into married life with her husband who pursues his passion for stand-up comedy on the side.  It very quickly establishes itself as slightly different from the rest of Palladino's previous work, deviating from many of the traits that made them so beloved.  There is no small town charm, the character quirks are dialed down, and its time period sets it before many of the items in her usual arsenal of pop culture references.

And yet, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel still feels unmistakably like an Amy Sherman-Palladino show.  One of the qualities it retains from her previous shows is the rapid-fire dialogue, which feels right at home in this setting.  It's always a joy to hear Palladino's signature repartee ping pong between characters, and this pilot has no shortage of witty, sharp, and character-defining banter.  Additionally, the show continues her love of brassy brunettes.  Like Lorelai Gilmore and Michelle Simms before her, Midge feels like a dame straight out of a Howard Hawks screwball comedy.  Rachel Brosnahan has some big shoes to fill after Lauren Graham and Sutton Foster, and she rises to the occasion, imbuing her character with a verve that makes her pop immediately.  Brosnahan has been good enough in past roles, but here she feels like a revelation.  While she may not display the vulnerability of a Graham or Foster yet, she's able to completely nail the timing and delivery of the show's difficult dialogue, which is a promising start.

Some viewers might be a little impatient with this episode in the early stages, but I would advise them to wait it out.  Like Bunheads, the pilot involves a great deal of setup before it really gets to the meat of the show.  Once it does, however, it absolutely sings.  Last year's A Year in the Life revival of Gilmore Girls reminded the world of how wonderful Amy Sherman-Palladino's unique style can be, but The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel takes it a step further, showing us how joyous it is to see that style applied to a totally new setting and array of characters.  This one's a winner; let's see if Amazon agrees too.

Grade: B+

Bunheads vs. Gilmore Girls

The common pitch to get people to watch Bunheads is, "Did you like Gilmore Girls?  If so, then you'll probably like this."  After all, those who were fond of Amy Sherman-Palladino's brand of lightning-quick dialogue and breezy, female-centric stories on Gilmore Girls would find it easy to settle into Bunheads, which ported over the former's charms with few adjustments.  The parallels didn't stop there either -- both shows featured Kelly Bishop filling the brittle elderly woman role, the relationship between Fanny and Michelle mirrored Lorelai and Emily's, Truly had a bit of Sookie's sweet but neurotic qualities, and Paradise was essentially a west coast Stars Hollow.  In fact, the similarities proved to be too numerous for some, who accused Bunheads of being a cheap imitation of Gilmore Girls, and even those who like both mostly prefer the latter.  So I'm here to deliver a rare and controversial opinion:  I like Bunheads more than Gilmore Girls.

Though I prefer Bunheads, if you were to break both shows down to their individual qualities, Gilmore Girls would still have some advantages.  For example, Bunheads didn't have the great sense of history that Gilmore Girls had.  In a way, Bunheads was about a makeshift family, and the show's 18 episodes were about building the kind of history that Gilmore Girls already had implanted into its DNA from the beginning.  In true Amy Sherman-Palladino fashion, much of the crucial events in the Gilmore family happen offscreen, in this case years before the show even premiered, beginning with Lorelai getting pregnant and running away from home at 16.  The bundles of pain, regret, and disappointment in the relationship between Lorelai, Emily, and Richard were so precariously stacked that the writers were able to convey so much about them through so little.  Those years and years of bruised history were always something that they could fall back on for a meaty story ("Christopher Returns," "Dear Emily and Richard," etc).

But Bunheads had some tricks of its own too.  It took all of the common elements in Amy Sherman-Palladino's wheelhouse and added something crucial: dance.  In the short time that Bunheads on the air, its dance sequences were the best thing on television, bar none.  Performance elements in shows tend to be a way to express subtext without doing it through dialogue, and some of the dance sequences in Bunheads did that, as in episode two, where a dance sequence underlines how much the girls appreciate Fanny.  But sometimes they were capable of transcending the point of being a mere thematic device, and instead became a visualization of raw, primal emotions.  Each of the dances on the show -- no matter how small -- were always varied, visually dynamic, well-choreographed, and most of all, shot in fluid takes that went unbroken for impressive lengths.

Part of the reason why it could get away with such sequences is that it was, at its core, a much darker show than Gilmore Girls.  While Gilmore Girls might have been about a woman who ran away and had a kid at 16 years old, the darker aspects of the show were always balanced out by its WB-ness, small-town quirk, and that prevailing sense that everything would ultimately be okay.  Bunheads, on the other hand, had a sense that everything may not be okay, but you have to learn to adapt and make do.  On Gilmore Girls, Lorelai's life is pretty stable -- she has a wonderful daughter, her own business, and many friends in Stars Hollow.  Between Michelle's failed dance career, dead husband, and new role of responsibility that she's not prepared for; she's floundering much more.  Minus a few boat-stealing, home-wrecking stumbles along the way, Rory Gilmore's seven-season arc consisted of everything going her way.  The four bunheads don't have it as easy as special genius Rory, however.  Boo is stuck with a body type that will never be conducive to a successful dance career, Sasha is struggling with what to do in the wake of her parents' divorce, Melanie's anger issues sometimes cause her to violently lash out, and Ginny loses her virginity to a boy who couldn't be bothered to give her the time of day afterward.  While some people may like the lighter fare that Gilmore Girls provides, the dark core of Bunheads is something that lingers with me much more.

In an LA Times article, Amy Sherman-Palladino emphasized that Gilmore Girls and Bunheads were both products of the eras in which they aired by pointing out the differences between their construction.  Among them, the most notable was the insight that each Gilmore Girls episode consisted of three acts, while a Bunheads episode consisted of six.  As a result, Bunheads felt like a faster-paced show, since it had to structure the episodes around more act breaks.  Both shows are still notable for their relative lack of plot, but Bunheads was better at giving off the impression of forward progression.  This makes Gilmore Girls easier to skip around on, and Bunheads better to watch in linear chunks.

Rory Gilmore is one of my all-time favorite characters -- yes, I know that I'm boring -- but Bunheads having four teenage girls in its main cast allowed for the show to have a wider perspective.  Sasha, Boo, Ginny, and Melanie all had distinct personalities from the start of the show, allowing for more opportunities to have the audience identify with them.  Gilmore Girls may have given Rory people like Lane and Paris to bounce off of, but Bunheads explored female friendships in a far more complex way.  These were four girls who had their disagreements, but they were ultimately people who cared deeply about one another.  Plus, as much as I defend Alexis Bledel, the four actresses on Bunheads were much better than her.  (Have I mentioned that they danced?!)

Bunheads may have had female friendships down, but nothing can touch the mother-daughter relationship that's central to Gilmore Girls.  Rory and Lorelai's relationship is without a doubt the greatest mother-daughter relationship I've ever seen on television, and as much as Bunheads tried to hint at a slowly developing kinship between Michelle and the four girls, they couldn't come close to the two Gilmores.  Their sister-like closeness may not be something that we all aspire to, but it's admirable and enjoyable to watch nonetheless.  It's what makes their slow drifting in the show's later years all the more powerful.  The show's other mother-daughter relationship, Lorelai and Emily, gives Gilmore Girls another advantage.  They're almost like the flipside to Rory and Lorelai, their years defined by distance instead of an airtight bond, and even when they do have moments of mutual understanding, it's always informed by the tenuous strings that tie them together.  Once again, Bunheads attempted to create something like it with Michelle and Fanny, but it also couldn't compare to the execution on Gilmore Girls.

Ultimately, the Bunheads vs. Gilmore Girls debate runs into the same problem that Joss Whedon fans do when they compare Buffy and Firefly.  Gilmore Girls lasted seven 22-episode seasons and its length provides a breadth of quality that Bunheads just couldn't match.  The cumulative magnitude of "They Shoot Gilmores, Don't They?," "The Incredible Sinking Lorelais," and many of their other best episodes outshines the sum total of Bunheads' run.  We also never really got the chance to know Paradise like we got to know Stars Hollow.  The side characters on Bunheads felt like great characters, but those on Gilmore Girls felt like whole people.  On the other hand, Bunheads wasn't afforded the time to last long enough for us to get tired of any of those side characters (can you imagine still finding Truly amusing in season seven of that show?)  Its star burned short, but we got to remember its overwhelming brightness as opposed to the slow fade of Gilmore Girls.  Should Gilmore Girls get more credit for spreading its high quality out over a few seasons or should Bunheads get the edge because it never lasted long enough to stagnate?

Perhaps it's actually simpler than that.  I missed Gilmore Girls the first time around, so Bunheads was my first exposure to Amy Sherman-Palladino's work.  Meanwhile, most people watched Bunheads after they'd already seen Gilmore Girls.  So maybe it's just a matter of which of the two shows one watches first determining their favorite.  I guess we'll never truly know.  But really, guys, Bunheads is better.


Gilmore Girls Week ends here.  Don't miss Monday's overview of the entire show, Tuesday's essay on season four's "The Incredible Sinking Lorelais," Wednesday's look into Rory Gilmore's dating history, and Thursday's list of the show's 10 best episodes.

The top 10 episodes of Gilmore Girls

Over the course of its seven-season run, Gilmore Girls aired a total of 153 episodes.  Just that count alone would make it hard to narrow the show down to a list of the 10 best ones, but it's even more difficult given the level of consistency exhibited during the show's best seasons.  One of the greatest qualities of the show is that many of the episodes feel self-contained enough that, despite the serialized nature of the seasons, one could pick and choose episodes to revisit without feeling too lost on the story.  The show is the ultimate comfort food -- there's something about its blend of slow-moving plot and fast-paced dialogue that lulls you into a state of relaxation and makes you want to return to it over and over.

In my overview piece on Monday, I noted that the show had many different modes it operated in, and everybody's got their favorites.  Judging from my picks, my favorite episodes tend to be the dramatic ones, as most of them are heavy on conflict and feature a big emotional moment or two.  Some hardcore fans may be appalled by how many episodes from the show's later seasons I have on the list, but my choice can be explained by two reasons: 1. I like the Yale years much more than the majority of the Gilmore Girls community and 2. I tried to spread it out and represent every season.  (For the record, I have a very bizarre ranking of the seasons: 5, 4, 3, 1, 2, 6, 7.)  So I guess it's technically not a list of the best episodes.  For example, I really wanted to find a way to put something like "Girls in Bikinis, Boys Doin' the Twist" in the top 10, because I really love that episode, but I felt like the list already featured enough season four material.  However, each of the choices on the list are certainly top tier episodes.

A look at Rory Gilmore's dating history

There's an old TV adage that says, "Happy couples aren't very interesting."  Though we want stability in our real life relationships, it's generally not what we want from our television couples, give or take an Eric and Tami Taylor.  That's the reason why fictional couples don't last very long -- eventually, even those for whom you most fiercely rooted to get together run the risk of stagnating.  If that's the case, then it's natural for a show that ran as long as Gilmore Girls did to have its two main characters go through so many relationships.

In my piece on Monday where I did an overview of the show as a whole, I mentioned that Gilmore Girls tracks Rory Gilmore's entire adolescence over the course of seven seasons.  While not everybody knows what it's like to go from a prestigious high school to an Ivy League university, there is something universal about the basic coming-of-age she experiences.  It makes sense (and is somewhat amusing), then, that on her way she cycles through many of the male archetypes that one is likely to date in their young adult years.  The shipper battles are intense within the Gilmore Girls fandom, and much blood has been shed over Team Dean vs. Team Jess debates.  (Meanwhile, the few Team Logan members remain hidden in a corner.)  But really, all of the internecine squabbling is pointless, because I have this theory that we're supposed to feel the same way that Rory does about the men on the show at any given moment.  Gilmore Girls is a show from the perspective of these two women, so it's natural that our opinions -- or mine, at least -- about people change when theirs do.

I was too busy nursing my own crush on her to care much about the boyfriends, but regardless of whom you prefer, you can't deny that Rory Gilmore is very crappy at relationships.  From making it obvious that she has feelings for Jess when she's still with Dean, to later sleeping with Dean when he's married to another woman, her bad decisions with men are the one major flaw in an otherwise great person.  So without further ado, let's delve into these boys and their respective archetypes:

The Canon #10: Gilmore Girls - "The Incredible Sinking Lorelais" (2004)

The Canon is a recurring feature that looks back on outstanding movies, TV episodes, albums, books, etc.; inducting them into an imaginary canon of all-time great things.  (Inspired by the podcast, Extra Hot Great.)

Everybody has bad days.  Sometimes when you're having a particularly rotten one, all you want to do is talk to the one person who can make you forget about it all and feel better.  For Rory Gilmore, that person is her mother Lorelai, and vice versa.  The first three seasons of Gilmore Girls were built on the foundation of their unbreakable bond, and the notion that no matter how bad things got, they always had each other to lean on.  (This idea was often used literally -- just think about how many episodes ended with the two of them embracing in some way.)  Consequently, season four of the show was a big risk, since Rory going off to Yale stood to alter the dynamic between her and Lorelai.  Although they were close enough in proximity to still see each other in person, they were far enough away that they couldn't always immediately be there for each other.  Instead of avoiding the shift in Rory and Lorelai's relationship, Amy Sherman-Palladino decided to lean into it and tackle the idea head on.

In "The Incredible Sinking Lorelais," the 13th episode of season four, Lorelai Gilmore is having a no good, very bad day.  It doesn't start off that way though: the episode begins with her, Sookie, and Michel marveling at the progress of the Dragonfly Inn, the new bed and breakfast that they're starting on their own.  It's almost time for the grand opening, and they're happy because the phones have just been hooked up, allowing them to log their first reservation.  But Lorelai gets the first bit of bad news shortly after that, as Tom, the head of the construction crew in charge of building the inn, informs her that the money is running short and his men won't be able to do the work much longer if they're not getting paid.  Once the seal breaks, a whole deluge of problems start to flow through.  She then gets into a rare fight with Sookie, who forgets to be there to sign off on an expensive sink needed for the Dragonfly's kitchen, causing it to be shipped back to Canada.  As if that weren't enough, she has to deal with the arrival of her grandmother in Hartford, who sees through Lorelai's problems and susses out that she's hemorrhaging funds.

Lorelai is a person who has made it her mission to be as independent as possible, starting from the day she had Rory and decided raise her without the help of her parents or Christopher.  So asking for a handout -- from Luke, she ultimately decides -- is a big deal for her.  Her business failing is one thing, but the embarrassment of having to seek another's help makes it worse.  But even worse than that is that she keeps trying to call Rory -- her rock, the one person who's always there to make her feel better -- but can't reach her.

Little does Lorelai know that Rory is having a no good, very bad day as well.  Aside from Lane staying at Yale due to a squabble with her mother and Paris being embroiled in a squabble of her own with Janet, Rory's going through a regular Yale day at first.  However, things take a turn when Paris finds out that Lane knows about the affair she's having with a professor, and gets angry with Rory for telling her.  When Paris confronts Rory about this, she also demands that Lane move out of their dorm, stating that their two other roommates agree that Lane has overstayed her welcome.  Initially, Rory doesn't believe it, but Paris's claims are confirmed when she later talks to Tana and Janet about it.  Much like with Lorelai, once the ball of bad news gets rolling, its momentum just keeps increasing.  The biggest blow comes when she visits her professor's office to get a paper back, and discovers that not only did she get a D on it, but that her professor thinks she should drop the class, out of concern that Rory is overworking herself.

Until now, Rory has always been the perfect student, not used to even the most minor academic setback.  Getting a D and having to drop a class is a major shortcoming for her, despite her professor's consolation that many freshmen struggle with the Yale curriculum.  The fact that her grandfather took the same course load and did just fine only makes her feel more inadequate.  And all she's got are voicemail messages from Lorelai; every time she tries to seek comfort from her mother, she can't get the real thing.

There's a beautiful symmetry to "The Incredible Sinking Lorelais."  Rory and Lorelai's storylines sit side by side, and the episode cuts from one Gilmore girl to the other, following both of their days as they decline at a similar rate.  The missed calls start off as a great joke, as we see Lorelai and Rory debate over an amusing story about an old horse through the exchange of voicemails.  But it quickly becomes clear that these failed connections are the structural elemental around which the episode is hung, and the way that they become more urgent the longer Rory and Lorelai go without hearing from one another is very effective.  Even their breakdowns mirror each other: they come back-to-back, involve both women crying in the arms of men, and have the words "I'm failing" buried somewhere in there.  It's no surprise that Lauren Graham knocks her scene out of the park, but Alexis Bledel's acting is particularly moving; it may be her best performance in the entire series.  At this point, Rory and Lorelai are close in proximity and on similar emotional wavelengths, yet they have no idea.  That's what makes the ending of the episode so brutal.  They're both listening to the last voicemail that the other left, and if one of them decided to call at that moment, they'd be able to reach the other.  But they're both so tired and upset that they give up and go to bed.

In a way, this is the episode that splits the series and informs everything that comes afterward.  It does that on a short-term level -- notice how Rory and Lorelai both cry in the arms of the men they hook up with in the season finale -- but for the long-term as well.  Although Rory and Lorelai's closeness is what defines their relationship, it was never going to remain as ironclad as it did during the Chilton years.  Rory's in the process of growing up and growing away from Lorelai, and the communication breakdown between them here foreshadows the fighting and drifting that they go through in seasons five and six.  "The Incredible Sinking Lorelais" is the best Gilmore Girls episode because it's a powerful story of two women unable to share their pain with the one they love the most, but it's also the most important in the way that it delineates their dynamic over the two separate eras of the show.


Gilmore Girls Week continues tomorrow at 8:00 AM EST with a piece on the many boyfriends of Rory Gilmore.  The series kicked off yesterday with an overview of the entire show.

Late to the Party #10: Gilmore Girls (2000-2007)

Welcome to Gilmore Girls Week!  A new article related to Gilmore Girls will be posted every day at 8:00 AM EST until Friday.

Late to the Party is a recurring feature that addresses older movies, TV shows, albums, and books that I missed the first time around.

When I was a little 11 year-old kid, I had a huge crush on Alexis Bledel.  (Who am I kidding? I still do.)  For that reason and that reason alone, I'd seen a few episodes of Gilmore Girls during its original airing.  Watching it was like doing spy work -- I felt like I had to "sneak" and watch only bits and pieces of episodes, lest I be caught viewing a WB show with "girls" in the title.  From those cursory viewings, along spending much of the following years reading pop culture websites, I knew many of the show's broad plot strokes.  It wasn't until Bunheads came around in 2012 that I was fully introduced to the work of Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino.  Anybody who's been reading this blog long enough knows how much I loved Bunheads, and its cancellation left me with a need to satisfy my Amy Sherman-Palladino fix, a need that finally made me decide to watch Gilmore Girls in its entirety.

Because I worked backwards, it was interesting to see where the Amy Sherman-Palladino train first got moving after watching Bunheads.  All the signposts I became familiar with on Bunheads were there from the beginning in Gilmore Girls: the fast-paced dialogue, the primarily female cast, the arcane pop culture references.  Like Bunheads, Gilmore Girls was a balance between small-town drama and family drama, and as with all shows that fall into the former category, it made its setting -- the sleepy, quirky town of Stars Hollow -- a character of its own.  But its true strengths lied in the show's elements of the latter.

Gilmore Girls was a story of generational transference, and it contrasted the parental relationship between Lorelai and her parents, Richard and Emily, with that of Rory and Lorelai.  Lorelai's strict upbringing was characterized by a cold distance from her parents, so when she got pregnant at 16 and ran off to Stars Hollow, she decided to raise Rory in the exact opposite way.  Through Lorelai's relationship with her parents, the show explored how disappointment, regret, and pain could cloud things like love.  But through Lorelai's relationship with her daughter, they showed how unbreakable the bond between mother and daughter could be.  Close relationships between a parent and their child had been depicted before, but none as deeply or complexly as Rory and Lorelai's was.  In just one exchange of dialogue between the two of them, you could instantly see the years of rapport that they've built with each other.  They had the same mannerisms, the same reference points, the same tastes -- Rory and Lorelai weren't just mother and daughter, they were best friends too.

It's that kind of character relationship that carried the story even when the rest of the show was finding its footing in the first season.  Even still, it didn't take long to hit its stride, right around the time of the sixth episode, "Rory's Birthday Parties."  There's something very pure and simple about season one of Gilmore Girls.  It had that heartwarming quality that many WB shows of the time contained, a quality whose last vestiges can be found on a few ABC Family programs, but has otherwise slowly disappeared in the years since the show premiered.  People argue over which seasons comprise its peak phase, but the Chilton years (seasons one through three) are the chunk that feel the most like "classic Gilmore Girls," and the episodes that fans go back to the most are likely to appear in this portion.  In just those three seasons, the show exhibited so many different modes it was capable of operating in: it could do small-town charm ("Cinnamon's Wake," "The Bracebridge Dinner"), family drama ("Forgiveness and Stuff," "Secrets and Loans," "There's the Rub"), romantic entanglements ("Star-Crossed Lovers and Other Strangers," "Teach Me Tonight"), breezy larks ("Road Trip to Harvard," "Richard in Stars Hollow"), and everything in between ("They Shoot Gilmores, Don't They?").  But in all of them, you could find an easygoing, comfort food vibe that made each episode so easy to swallow.

Despite the light, airy feel that marks all of her work, Amy Sherman-Palladino knows how to pack an emotional punch when she needs to.  I learned that the hard way with the "My banana's name is Frankie" moment in the Bunheads finale, but Gilmore Girls is crammed with instances of heart-wrenching drama.  It mostly did so by mining conflict from its aforementioned themes of generational divide, both from Lorelai's struggles to reconnect with Richard and Emily but also from her dealing with the responsibilities of guiding Rory through the hardships and heartbreaks of adolescence.  The drama comes naturally on Gilmore Girls.  Characters don't get upset with each other just for the sake of having something to push the story forward; the conflict derives from a place of deep, genuine hurt.

The show faced a problem that all long-running programs that start with a teen in high school face, after Rory graduated from Chilton at the end of season three and headed to Yale at the beginning of season four.  But this was an especially dangerous move for Gilmore Girls, since the series thrived on its scenes of Rory and Lorelai bonding and bouncing off of each other.  Though the proximity of Yale and Stars Hollow allowed for the two of them to still see each other, their storylines began to develop into almost completely separate entities, an indication of the model the show would follow for its last four years.  Despite the danger of less Rory-Lorelai scenes, season four still managed to be pretty great.  It's the show's funniest season, featuring episodes like "Chicken or Beef?" and "Girls in Bikinis, Boys Doin' the Twist," and the entire back half is just a roaring stretch of television.

That stretch closes out with "Raincoats and Recipes," an episode that leads to the twin bombshells of Lorelai kissing Luke and Rory sleeping with a married Dean, the latter of which causes a fight between Rory and Lorelai that bleeds into the beginning of season five.  The fifth season is my personal favorite, mostly because of how dramatically satisfying it is.  It's almost as if Amy Sherman-Palladino and her crew of writers made season four so comedic and fluffy in order to turn things around and knock us off of our feet even more with season five.  This season was all about the show's ground shifting, and almost every relationship that stood upon it -- Richard and Emily, Lorelai and Rory, Lorelai and Emily, Rory and Emily, Lorelai and Luke -- was shaken up.  In doing so, the show finally started tapping into the visual and emotional poetry that Bunheads would later prove itself capable of achieving.

Most television shows, particularly network ones that have to craft 22-episode seasons, are a very collaborative process.  However, Gilmore Girls was so clearly the vision of Amy Sherman-Palladino who, along with her husband Daniel, wrote and directed many of the episodes, and even took passes at ones they weren't credited for.  By the time season six rolled around, the workload became overwhelming.  This led to some behind-the-scenes drama between the two of them and The WB, who wanted them to do more work instead of letting them hire more writers.  They couldn't come to an agreement, and the Palladinos decided to step down as showrunners for the seventh season while in the middle of writing the sixth.  There were some grumblings about the show losing its touch right around the start of the Yale years, but many fans consider season six to be a complete drop-off in quality, and some cite the fact that Amy Sherman-Palladino knew she wasn't going to come back while writing it as a reason for the decline.  To them, the events of "Partings," which included Lorelai breaking off her engagement with Luke and sleeping with Christopher, are an example of Palladino salting the earth for the new showrunners.

Others just think the show was running out of steam regardless.  However, I think we're in need of a critical reappraisal of season six, which isn't the show's finest year, but is still a good season of television.  Season six is basically divided in half by its two most divisive storylines: Lorelai and Rory's extended fight and the arrival of April Nardini.  I'll defend the latter first, since it's probably the most controversial thing the show ever did.  I understand the natural inclination to retch at the idea of Luke discovering that he has a daughter he never knew about, but the storyline skillfully took something that feels extremely soapy and made it very "un-TV."  It's a complicating factor, but one that is imbued with enough subtlety and honest emotion that it doesn't feel like just a plot device.  In its later years, the show got very good at long-form plotting, and the way that the April story added to the slowly accumulating problems with Lorelai and Luke's engagement made their breakup in the finale well built to.

The fight between Rory and Lorelai was an even greater example of the meticulous accruement of story during the Chilton years.  It may have seemed like it was forced and inorganic, until you realize that the growing distance between the two of them was something that began way back in season four.  The fact that their squabble didn't end quickly like it would've in the early years doesn't make the conflict out of character, it just makes the separation hurt more.

Staff writer David S. Rosenthal took over as showrunner as the Palladinos stepped down, and the biggest problem that the show faced in its final season was the question, "would Amy and Daniel have done this?" lingering around every plot point.  Clearly, Rosenthal and the rest of the staff were handcuffed by Christopher and Lorelai now being together, even though the show's end game was contingent upon a happy ending for Luke and Lorelai.  As a result, they had to figure out a reason to dissolve Lorelai's relationship with Christopher and bring her back with Luke, and the execution was clumsily handled.  Additionally, though the show was never heavy on plot, many of the episodes felt logy, a quality underlined by an absence of the quick repartee that marked the show's first six seasons.  Even still, season seven is not terrible, and once all of the wreckage from the season six finale gets cleared up, the show settles into a lovely run for the last handful of episodes.

Before the drama with The WB, Amy Sherman-Palladino once said that she could have seen the show lasting beyond seven seasons.  But it's good that it ended when it did, even if the final season had the misfortune of carrying on without her.  As it stands, Gilmore Girls is a perfect encapsulation of one girl's adolescence -- mapping out Rory's start at Chilton to her graduation from Yale -- and a mother fully growing into adulthood via the process of guiding her daughter through that coming of age.  They say that you prefer whichever of the Gilmore girls you're closer to in age at the time you're watching the show, and that theory holds for me.  As a senior in college at the time of burning through the show last year, I found that Rory's stories resonated with me far greater than Lorelai's did.  (Being in college could also possibly be the explanation for why I'm so fond of the Yale years too.)  Many people find Rory to be a character who's increasingly difficult to like as the show goes on, but I found her arc as the golden child who slightly flounders before finding her way again to be incredibly moving.

Like many other network classics of its era -- Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The West Wing, The X-Files -- Gilmore Girls is unwieldy and bloated in a way that its cable contemporaries aren't.  It had a couple of lesser seasons, and many fans argue that it could've ended sooner, but when it was operating at the peak of its powers, it was an undeniable classic.  Its top tier episodes stand up there with the best television of the previous decade, and in a period defined by violent, dark shows, its family-friendly small-town drama made it stand out among its peers.  With Gilmore Girls, Amy Sherman-Palladino didn't just construct a story for one-time viewing; she crafted an entire world to come back to again and again.


Gilmore Girls Week continues tomorrow at 8:00 AM EST with a piece on season four's "The Incredible Sinking Lorelais."