Disclaimer: these little rants are spoiler-heavy and not recaps. I still think it's crazy I'm even doing this, but I spent a lot of time on the TWOP forums back in the day and I didn't realize until I watched this again how much the show had meant to me, how much I had missed it. I've got a lot to say and I don't really have anyone to talk to about it, because the forums are gone, Tumblr and Twitter are still too aghast at not getting the resolution to Rory's love life that they wanted, and no one in real life is going to get this. I also had lots of fun collecting the GIFs and captions. I spent years dissecting Luke and Lorelai's relationship, so expect lots of shipper talk. Strangely, after years of being indifferent to Rory's love life, I am now solidly #TeamJess. So take that as you will, and enjoy my random thoughts and pop culture musings.
I never wanted this revival to happen.
I have a long and complicated history with this show. I watched it happily during the first two and a half seasons, then quit because I was so over Rory's man issues. I started watching again when Lorelai and Luke got back together at the end of season 4, but I stopped watching quite so much when April showed up in season 6 and Christopher started sniffing around again. I could see the writing on the wall and by the time Lorelai threw her ultimatum and slept with Christopher, I was over it. I have seen about three episodes of the last season. I know Lorelai ended up with Luke at the last minute and that was all the resolution I needed. I have not-so-secretly thought for years that the writers always intended to have Lorelai run off with Christopher and that the only reason why that ended in the last season is because the story got away from them, and someone new came in and eventually fixed what they had ruined. I was fine with the ending and didn't want them to screw it up again.
I'm so glad I was wrong.
This particular shipper experience is a repeat of my angst over Doug and Carol in the first few seasons of ER, something that again got fixed at the last minute and left them in the perfect place. I never wanted the writers to revisit that again because I didn't trust them. I don't know if suffering through Lorelai's marriage with Christopher would be worse than watching Carol have Doug's babies alone while the writers try to convince us that the shoehorned-in love interest is superior, but I've never been interested in finding out. My shipper hopes kind of died with this Gilmore Girls experience, and I've rectified that by becoming attached to TV shows where so many character die that I don't have to worry about getting attached to anyone.
However, much like ER, this show did prove me wrong. In that case, I got a tidy epilogue that showed that Doug and Carol were married, domesticated and happy nine years later. With this show, I got much of the same, although there were some kinks and disappointments to work out. I knew there wasn't much danger in either case given that it was all but stated as such in the advance publicity, but I was still a little anxious. This shipper is happy, although I still haven't forgiven the writers for what happened before. Even as much as I love this revival, I doubt I'll go back and watch season 7.
I am pretty convinced that I don't want new episodes. Some of the things the Palladinos have said about Rory's future choices have really disturbed me and kind of tarnished my respect for that crazy ending. I'm also not crazy about the fact that Amy Sherman-Palladino has almost nothing to say about Luke and Lorelai but still gushes about how gorgeous Christopher is. They've written such a beautiful, thematically consistent ending, and then they have to ruin it all by opening their mouths. Jerks. I'm sort of horrified by some of the stuff they possibly envision for the future, so I'm more than content to leave things where they are.
I do believe that this incident in pop culture is pretty good evidence that it's untrustworthy to idolize writers and showrunners. Their visions are not sacrosanct: sometimes they're terribly, horribly wrong.
If the show had ended the way it did in 2007, it would have been a disaster, but updated to 2016, it does make sense . . . if you leave it the way that it is and just go with the interpretation that most fans have from that ending. I'd rather not hear what the showrunners have to say about it at this point. It is what it is, and it's best left alone.
Overall, I don't think that showrunners/writers really understand how passionate the fans are about the characters. To them, it's not any more significant than moving puzzle pieces around, and they don't get how hard the fans root for these characters and view them as real people. Television fandom is very different than it was ten years ago. The whole industry is catered to the fans and their obsessions: heck, there are elaborate aftershows these days where people just sit and talk about what happened for an hour. Actors are much more comfortable in that space than writers are: after all, they're the ones who have to answer these questions over and over. They go to the cons and root for their teams and while this enterprise probably isn't terribly healthy, I much prefer it to the era when showrunners were treated like gods who could do no wrong.
But regardless of all of that, this was the most fun I had watching TV in a long time and I really enjoyed it.
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