Poptarts, Idiot Men and Karl Marx — a guide to the Gilmore girls
Here is a guide to Gilmore Girls in case you have lived under a stone and missed all previous billion episodes but wish to indulge in this evening’s reboot on Netflix.
It’s basically a dumb show for smart people. Or people who think they’re smart. Gilmore Girls is about a town in the US where everyone is white, except for a man who works in a B&B and has two nice dogs. There was also a black extra around Season 4. There’s a woman who had a baby when she was a teenager and now they have a really bizarre relationship where they are more like friends than mother and daughter. These are the main characters.
They only eat poptarts and pizza and Chinese food and hot chocolate and have managed to not acquire Type 2 diabetes which, like Alicia Florrick’s drinking in the The Good Wife, was never addressed properly. If this new season is accurate, they would both have had their legs amputated by now. Also they drink so much coffee it’s difficult to see why they haven’t had heart attacks by now.
There’s also a Korean family where the mother is some kind of Christian evangelist, and initially she’s hateful but she comes good in the end. Lane is the Korean friend and surprisingly they did not make her wear a t-shirt that said “Token” on it. There are dark undertones to this show; a neighbour, Babette, has a garden gnome called Pierpoint.
The mother (Lorelai) comes from a well-to-do background and her parents were mortified at her choice to have her child (Rory) but eventually they come around after years of no-contact and they have dinner every Friday. The grandmother is kind of a shitebag initially but manages to come out of it one of the only decent characters really. Lorelai compares her to Stalin in a magazine interview once, which one could take as a compliment, except clearly Lorelai does not respect Comrade Stalin’s finer achievements so it doesn’t go down well.
Both Lorelai and Rory have a series of relationships with idiot men.
Lorelai has an on/off thing with a man who looks like Nicholas Cage and wears a backwards cap and a flannel shirt all the time to indicate he is working class. He owns a diner in which they buy breakfast everyday. There’s also an episode where Luke goes to see some of the town elders which is an obvious Star Wars reference but Mark Hoskins disputes this.
Rory had a thing with the Cage-A-Like’s nephew Jess, and she once encouraged him to read The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. He essentially told her to fuck off (in nicer non-sweary words) because Rand is a nut. She then went out with a rich chap called Logan who was a bit harmless but it didn’t work out. She went out with a person called Dean before his. Dean was a moron.
Rory is also an entitled whinger.
Rory is friends with a highly strung lunatic named Paris who once waitressed at an event and called all the attendees “commodity fetishists.” She has a poster of Derrida on her wall at college. Paris is without a shadow of a doubt the best character. She also appears to be a Marxist but this is never fully articulated in the show.
Melissa McCarthy is in it and she has a load of kids. Her last pregnancy happened because her husband was a prick who lied about getting a vasectomy. That said, there’s a Planned Parenthood poster on the Rory’s bedroom wall at one stage so I’m not reading it as a some anti-choice propagandist subtext when she has the baby.
There are also some incredibly bad gay-panic references in it including the use of the words “poofy” and a remark that gay people kissing looks “weird.” Lorelai and Rory are generally terribly selfish people, and the show would have been better if they had just made it all about Paris.
You are now prepared to watch the new episodes later. Good luck.
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