The “Gilmore Girls” Revival Is Good Enough

By Kelly Conaboy November 28, 2016

Whew.

It is much better than this image would have you believe.

Donald Trump is president-elect. My second ficus is dying even though I’ve taken care of it perfectly. America is full of Nazis. The “Gilmore Girls” revival is not bad. We’ve certainly had a lot of surprises lately.

When Netflix announced their plan to revive “Gilmore Girls” for another season, my response was the same as that of a lot of “Gilmore Girls” fans who are too old to call themselves that at this point: “please don’t.” Nah-uh. Just because you miss your grandma doesn’t mean you should dig her up, dress what remains of her in her old clothes, and move what’s left of her hands around in the kitchen so if you take off your glasses it almost looks like she’s making you her special tuna melt one last time. No, thank you. The memories of grandma’s tuna melt are enough and I’d rather not have a corpse in my food prep area.

They made it, though. And the ads were terrible. And the this thing was terrible. And reading everyone write about “Gilmore Girls” so much was terrible especially when it was me doing it. And then Donald Trump was elected president. And then my ficus started dying even though technically it should be thriving. And then “Gilmore Girls: A Year In the Life” was released on Netflix and —

Oh my god…

Whaaaaaat?

For the most part, it felt natural. Watching it felt good. I liked the things that happened. (I’m not a TV critic.) The pop culture references peppered throughout the dialogue were sometimes very terrible, the worst being “rocked a Spelling,” but what went wrong never overshadowed the things that went right. Rory isn’t a teacher, thank god, and she is still insufferable and a terrible friend, thank god. Luke and Lorelai are Luke and Lorelai. Emily is very Emily. The final words, of course — how did we not see them coming. Watching the first episode with my mom at 8 a.m. on November 25th made me feel the emotion “happy.” It was very nice to see Sasha from “Bunheads.” It was a joy to see Sutton Foster in the way-too-long but otherwise very enjoyable Stars Hollow musical. It is nice that Michelle is allowed to be gay now. Also I loved seeing Jason Mantzoukas because he is one of my top crushes and I would like to go on a date with him. I pitched the idea of me going on a date with him to Vulture.com as a blog post and they rejected it.

Of course, The “Gilmore Girls” revival was not perfect. Did Rory have a framed photo of David Carr on her wall while she was editing the Stars Hollow Gazette? Yes. Did Dean — Dean, terrible, still the worst, so boring, a block of wood — say he lives in Scranton now, SCRANTON!, which he intimated was boring — incredible, coming from Dean, imagine — and was that a personal “fuck you” directly from creator Amy Sherman-Palladino to me Kelly Conaboy? Yes. Did Rory’s freelance journalism career feature enough inaccuracies that bloggers were forced to take to Twitter to point all of them out, as if portraying their careers exactly correctly is paramount, as if doctors see a doctor on TV and think “they nailed it”? Yes.

But it was good enough. Thank god.