Oy With the Poodles Already

So today’s the day Gilmore Girls will be available on Netflix — even Canadian Netflix, so that’s the only reason I give a shit.

I’ve actually watched the first five seasons of Gilmore Girls I think, at this point, eighteen times all the way through. This makes me sound like some kind of obsessed Gilmore Girls fan, but the truth is so much stranger — at this point, I actually no longer know if I even like the show?!? I watched it when it first premiered, of course; I was fourteen years old, bookish, and back then, brunette, so I was the precise demographic. But at some point Gilmore Girls became the show I always, always watched when I went to the gym, kind of like that cliché of people who watch cooking shows on the treadmill, watching people eat etc. I’m almost positive someone on Gilmore Girls makes this exact joke at some point.

Anyway, the reruns were always on when I used to go to the gym after some long-ago office job (right at 5:30pm, at a gym populated almost entirely with other legal secretaries), and I really got into the habit of letting their rapidfire dialogue lull me into forgetting that elliptical machines are boring.

Later, I started working out at home — I have weights and a mat and a stack of weird DVDs that I mute on my laptop and then run a Gilmore Girls episode on my boyfriend’s desktop computer behind it. And when I reach the end of the fifth season I start over. Sometimes I’ll mix it up and watch an episode of The Good Wife or something, but it’s almost always Gilmore Girls. This is so weird and embarrassing to admit for some reason! My secret Gilmore Girls shame. Now, watching Gilmore Girls is something I don’t even really think about on a critical level; it’s just what I do, no questions asked.

The point is, I really appreciated this article on the weird teeny tiny flaws of the show, because, as you might imagine, by this point I’ve really honed in to some of the strange mistakes and character behaviours that go unnoticed during the first seventeen viewings. Like, it’s so true that Lorelai and Emily are the best part, and that no one can hug properly, particularly Rory, but also: have you noticed that the takeout coffee cups are always empty? This is something all movies and television shows do, but on Gilmore Girls, they REALLY show that there’s no weight in their cups. Also Sherilynn Fenn plays two separate parts, but for one of them she has blonde hair, so I guess it doesn’t count. Also! When Rory goes to university, the sound on her dorm room door is unbelievably exaggerated. Like, they dialed up the “door opening” sound to eleven. It’s ridiculous.

I think my real point is that I will not be watching Gilmore Girls on Netflix because I’ve clearly seen enough for one lifetime. Happy Wednesday!