I grew up in Stars Hollow. By which I mean, I was raised in a village—the “village” designation was always very important to my home town—where an overabundance of troubadours was dealt with in a town meeting, and where I was a dancer at, no kidding, a studio called Miss Patti’s. I was in sixth grade when “Gilmore Girls” premièred, a show in which those quirks were part of the atmosphere. One night after ballet, my mom and I watched. In the first scene I caught of the first episode, I saw a dazzling woman with a strange name looking for a missing bird—her daughter Rory’s science project—and shouting, “Stellaaaa!” My mom laughed. I didn’t know why, but I wanted to. Soon enough, I did. In this way, I also learned about Russian novels and Patti Smith and “Grey Gardens” and Dorothy Parker. Lorelai Gilmore (Lauren Graham), a stylish innkeeper with an enviable music collection, and her daughter, Rory (Alexis Bledel), a sweet teen-ager aspiring to be Christiane Amanpour, were characters I sought to emulate, and dreamed of hanging out with.
I was four years behind Rory in school, at just the right distance to follow. We Bush II-era teens escaped to Gilmoreland to watch democracy delightfully rendered as Town Selectman gags. We wanted a mom as fun as Lorelai and a boyfriend as cool as Jess. (He’s from New York.) When “Gilmore Girls” ended, in 2007, and the charmed enclosure of Stars Hollow—its seasonal festivals, its Edgar Allan Poe Society controversies, its coffee addiction—entered cryogenic freeze, I still clung to my parallels. And, even after my life moved beyond Rory’s time line, Stars Hollow remained a retreat (first on DVD, then on Netflix). Yet I can’t be the only one for whom, as the years passed, watching the young Rory brought some of the uncanny dread of a home movie.
Ten years later, she seems never to have graduated to adulthood. In the revival for Netflix, “A Year in the Life,” our girls, now both women—Rory is thirty-two, the age that Lorelai was when the original series began—reunite after what “feels like years,” they say, with a hug. In the first episode, “Winter,” we learn that Rory is returning home to Stars Hollow after an extended reporting trip; she is now—the parallels continue—a writer for The New Yorker and The Atlantic. Perfectly coiffed and mascaraed, she and Lorelai banter fast and walk slow around the gazebo in the central square, where everything looks exactly as it did before. (And there’s Miss Patti teaching a dance class: hi, fictional Miss Patti!) Back at the house, Lorelai warns of “Proud Luke”—Luke Danes, the change-averse town-diner owner, who has remained her partner for nine years. When we see him again, he congratulates Rory on a recent piece for this magazine’s Talk of the Town section, and says that he’s now a New Yorker subscriber. But Rory slips from proud to perturbed to past hope. She regresses with an old boyfriend, forgetting her current one exists. Her latest story for The Atlantic is killed. In her early thirties, she is hitting a wall. Is journalism really a viable profession? What is she trying to discover with her writing? How could she fall asleep mid-interview and then have a one-night stand with a source dressed as a Wookiee? By “Summer,” Rory is swallowed by her past life, bumming around her childhood haunts.
“Wow, like a time machine,” April, Luke’s daughter (an unfortunate character from the weaker, later years of the original series, who is, nevertheless, very perceptive), says, as she walks into Rory’s bedroom. April, a senior in college, tells Rory that she’s “still kind of searching.” Rory doesn’t seem to relate. “I think I’m having an anxiety attack,” April goes on, over Rory’s thin attempts to console her. “It’s just very weird here, seeing you back in your childhood room. It’s like a postcard from the real world.” Rory tries to squirm away, but we’ve got her now. Journalism is supposed to involve some discomfort; Amanpour’s eminence was built on years of dogged war reporting; and how could Richard Gilmore have been so mellow about his granddaughter pursuing a career that doesn’t necessarily promise insurance? The girl who had for so long been unencumbered by reality is, at last, facing genuine challenges, and her own shortcomings. Just like the rest of us Rorys must.
Throughout “A Year in the Life,” it’s exasperating to watch Rory foundering in uncertainty, but she has atoned and reset before. Much more frustrating, to me, was seeing Lorelai stuck—in the office of a vacuous therapist in “Spring”; in a miserably overlong musical rehearsal in “Summer”; outside the Pacific Crest Trail (a tribute to “Wild”) in “Fall”; and, throughout, in murky relationship trouble with Luke. Happiness eludes her. Her father’s death fills her with a foggy kind of despair. (Rory somehow recovers quickly.) Emily Gilmore (Kelly Bishop), the grandmother and Wasp queen, gets the lone satisfying arc, delivering herself from profound grief after taking one last D.A.R. cookie.
But plot was never the point of “Gilmore Girls.” The new series, like the old, is all about the hang: “Talk. Don’t talk. Whatever,” as it was defined in the show’s early days. The pleasure of watching doesn’t come as much from what the Gilmores do as what they say (and how fast they say it). And so what is said, in the standout scene of the “Year,” stings. In “Summer,” Emily brings Lorelai and Rory to check on the fifth try at a headstone for Richard. The punctuation’s amiss. While Emily is off lambasting whoever’s responsible, Rory, having turned her framed David Carr headshot to the wall sometime before, tells her mother about her intention to write a memoir of their lives. “No,” Lorelai replies. “I don’t want you to write that.” Rory, like so many millennial writer types before her, has decided that she is her own best subject, but telling that story violates the fabulous vortex of Stars Hollow—of innocence itself. To dwell there is a privilege, and Rory has come to feel entitled to much too much, exposing the roots her mother had so arduously planted, simply to sell a book proposal. Her favorite works of art—journalistic, novelistic, whatever—overlap with life, but she ought to be well read enough to know that telling stories can upend the realities of living. Rory and Lorelai have always talked in circles, never moving, but, at the end of the “Year,” Rory has returned to where Lorelai began. Perhaps, since it’s revealed in the last four words that Rory is pregnant, it will be motherhood, again, that forces a girl to grow up.
