'The Gilmore Girls' Gone Wild

Welcome to the introductory installment of "Gilmore Girls Gone Wild," a digest of each episode's themes and implications. In the spirit of clearing the air and trying to locate a quasi-journalistic purpose before the Fall 2004 season begins, I wanted to address why this column even exists.

This is indeed a good question, and it has two answers. The first is that I am strangely transfixed by the show. Much as I want to resist the tractor beam of each episode, I just can't pull away. And yet I'm by no means a "Gilmore Girls" expert. Only during the past two seasons have I really begun paying attention. But the hooks are now in. I take no calls during its Tuesday night window. I curse the set when it stiffs me with reruns. I've grown pedantic and bitchy in my appreciation. I've even borrowed the DVD set of the first season, courtesy of my 16-year-old sister-in-law.

The second and longer answer is that I find the show deeply strange and weird in many ways. For instance, part of the appeal has to do with the rank unrealism of the show, which you can pick up on after about 30 seconds of dialogue. Granted, not many shows are what one would call "realistic," but usually there is the pretense of realistic conversation. The show's writers dispensed with this feeble notion long ago. Just listen to the characters go on and on and on: so articulate, so chatty, so self-referential and deprecating and smarmy.

There's something both ingratiating and grating about each character's mode of talk, which is just like every other character's mode of talk. They all have the same form of hyper-exchange, except of course for Luke, who is the equivalent of this show's Noble Savage. (I would guess that this style of dialogue first reared its precocious head on "Dawson's Creek"; you could even argue that that show's Joey character was a bigger doe-eyed version of the GG's Rory.) Each dialogue exchange is not just a bit of communication between characters, but a mini essay, a self-diagnosis of their own personalities and predicaments, part scene and part comment on the scene. It's weird, complex stuff. Seriously. Stay tuned for up-to-date examples.

And, let's be honest, another fascinating facet of the show is that there's something attractive both sexually and spiritually about mother and daughter Gilmore. They've got this strange Doublemint gum-like similarity of appearance that doesn't quite shade over into the creepy attraction-to-twins and/or sisters fetish currently in vogue (see the Hiltons, the Olsens, the Williams, Bushses), but is still alluring and creepy in its own right. For instance, Lorelai is-in the parlance of my high school friends-a total MILF. Plus, she's just so damn spunky. There's something charming about a grown woman acting so stridently adolescent, and an adolescent acting so overgrown. She's like your friend's cool mom who would buy you beer on the weekend and let you have girls over way past any wholesome hour, and who seemed to kind of, you know, flirt with you when no one else was looking.

Rory, however, has the sensibility of a career-minded middle-aged matron who's knee-deep in a mortgage. In short, she has practically no impulsive streak (that is, except for last season's clincher where she becomes The Other Woman). Physically, she still looks like an 8th grader. You could see the writers try to deal with this last season after sending her to college by chopping her hair and getting her out of the schoolgirl get-up. But its effect has only been so-so. Rory's face is perpetually that of the innocent child. (So perhaps the clinch-ending Dean-affair was an interesting turn of character, rather than the last creative gasp for a show that has realized its scenario has played itself out.) Together, the mother and daughter mirror each other: a reflection with everything reversed-the daughter the responsible one, the mother the impulsive dingbat.

And together, the Girls-they're not women-are so wholesome I feel like drinking milk and eating cookies after every show. They're both-and this might get close to the eye of their strange, stormy allure-terribly innocent and completely self-referential. They're both sexual and not. (There's a mental double-take when I write that they're attractive: they are, but I feel dirty for saying they are. See? Complicated.) They seem to be unironically sincere, or sincerely ironic. They seem to have it both ways. They seem to be grown up and completely immature. They seem to be both earnest and perennially mock-able, but they're also hip to their own devices and are jokey about it and are therefore able to touch into their own weekly, fatherless family poignancy even better.

And then there is the town, which is just like the Girls: picture perfect and aware of its own postcard gloss. The town is really the third star of the show, with its charmingly weirded-out New Englanders and its coffee shop and its square and the fact that people walk everywhere. It reminds me of the town in David Mamet's film State and Main. The town in that film was in Vermont, but it's the same idea: a small, New England town, which is both charming and limited because of its insular smallness. But the primacy of the town is on the wane as of last season, which leads to my next point about the timing of this column and the scary, inevitable fact that . . .

The show has so completely jumped the shark. The show has done what an episodic TV show should always resist doing: it has broken from its set. I don't know exactly why this is, but for some reason, we viewers get very attached to the fixed set of a TV show. Think of the bar in "Cheers." Think of the restaurant in "Seinfeld." Think of the house in the "Cosby Show." Shows can only deal with a handful of fixed sets where all of the action takes place. Granted this slightly Aristotelian constrictiveness must play hell on the writers/directors after a few seasons, but that's when the viewers' dependence on that regularity is most potent. Just think of the "Cosby Show" episodes where they stray outside of that house. They're horrid. Everything is all wrong. Nobody is where they're supposed to be. It's like having church outside. It's just a bad idea. Sadly, last season was the point at which the GG broke irrevocably from their fixed set of the town, Luke's, the grandparents' mansion, etc. Now everything is split between the town and the college, and you can feel the disconnect what with all the random and totally bogus visits home or to college between big and little Gilmore. It's just so obviously a broken beast now. I almost wished they had made Rory develop a drug habit and fail high school and be forced to stay home and rehab it or something because now the show is spiraling quickly ground-ward.

However, despite my apocalyptic visions for the show, I'm still pre-heating my oven for this fall's season. Hopefully this column will be a brief space where I can explain/expand/comprehend my attraction to the show and its implications, ideas which will hopefully be altered over the course of this column.

Got milk?