People who remember President G.W. Bush should remember Gilmore Girls, which was a TV show on The WB and The CW that started up in 2000 and finished up in 2007. While it was neither the most respected nor the most successful TV show from that particular period of time, its fast-paced dialogue, its numerous pop culture references, and its exploration of issues that remain relevant to women from a wide range of backgrounds combined to make it memorable. Better still, its colourful characters and pleasant setting combined to make it comfortable, which was a refreshing contrast to a lot of the other TV shows that were winning acclaim at around the same time.
Due to this, it should come as no surprise to learn that there has been a fair amount of interest in a follow-up to the Gilmore Girls, which was often considered to be incomplete because of the series creator, Amy Sherman-Palladino’s departure from the TV show in 2007. This resulted in Gilmore Girls: A Year In the Life, which is a four-part miniseries that was launched on Netflix in November, with each of the four parts focusing on one of the four seasons.
Unfortunately, TV shows are products of their times because the people who make them are products of their times. As a result, a prolonged hiatus can make it difficult for the show-makers to recapture the same creative spark that was responsible for making a particular TV show successful in the first place. Even worse, it is possible for that creative spark to have lost its power because what appealed to people in the past might not appeal as much to people in the present. Of course, none of these issues are insurmountable, but based on the results, it seems clear that Gilmore Girls: A Year In the Life has failed to overcome them in spite of the fact that it still retains a fair amount of appeal for people who loved the TV show, which should come as some consolation.
Why Gilmore Girls: A Year In the Life Fails to Live Up to Its Promise
First and foremost, the mini-series makes it clear that the characters seemed to have come to a stop upon the conclusion of the TV show. For example, Lorelei still has not married Luke at the start of the mini-series because of a lack of communications or something along those lines in spite of the fact that the two were resolved on that path at the end of the TV show, meaning that the two have been stalling for years and years for unsatisfactory reasons. Likewise, Rory has managed to become a freelance journalist who still struggles to carve out a position for herself in the journalistic world, meaning that in a real sense, not much has changed for her. Never mind her romantic life.
Second, a lot of these revelations leave a bitter aftertaste in the mouth. For example, Lorelei’s supposed narrative as an independent woman who managed to win what she wanted by overcoming the obstacles in her path ended up not getting those things after all. Likewise, Rory’s flailing calls up Mitchum Huntzberger’s claim that she did not possess the potential to become a successful journalist.
Third, Huntzberger’s claim seems to have been true, as shown by the fact that Rory is not a good journalist by any stretch of the definition. For example, she is not just bad at communicating with her editor but also bad at communicating with her sources, which is rather unfortunate when the basis of journalism is communicating with others in order to get important and interesting information before communicating that to interested individuals. In fact, she outright falls asleep while interviewing a source at one point, which is no more than the second worst example of her journalistic ineptitude because she actually slept with one of her sources at one point. Combined with the fact that Rory does not seem to get that different newspapers serve different interests on the part of their readerships, her continued flailing becomes less a matter of TV continuities not making much sense and more a matter of no surprise whatsoever, though it does raise the amusing idea that her mother would have been a better journalist because of her natural curiosity and gregariousness.
Fourth, some of what happens in the mini-series seems to play into some rather questionable attitudes. For example, Rory’s choice to sleep with one of her sources is not just unethical, but it also plays into a pernicious stereotype of the female journalist who uses sex to get ahead in her profession, which is rather unpleasant to say the least. Furthermore, it seems strange that Paris Geller would react like a love-stricken teenager when confronted with her teenage crush in spite of the fact that she is a mature adult who runs a rather successful business of her own.
Fifth, Gilmore Girls: A Year In the Life is too aware of its nature as a follow-up, with the result that it strives to include all of the TV show’s characters as much as possible. This is good because it gives a chance for fans of the TV show to catch up with their favourites, but at times, it goes too far because some of the fan-service contributed to the problem of bloat, which is a serious problem for the mini-series.
Sixth, Netflix seems to have given the show-makers a free hand, with the result that its narrative has suffered for a lack of editing, which is something that shows up in more mediums than just TV shows. While some of the excess can be considered entertaining in its own right, it still manages to drag down the entire mini-series by detracting from more relevant and thus more important parts of the narrative. While some reveling in the newfound extra space is understandable because it has been so long since the TV show, it nonetheless made the resulting product not what it could have been with better management.
