In the recent tradition of reviving shows that people love, but shouldn’t necessarily see new seasons of decades later (see: Arrested Development, Twin Peaks), Gilmore Girls joins the ranks of potentially damaging additions to its near unblemished reputation.
Maybe it had to do with the fact that Amy Sherman-Palladino hasn’t been able to catch a break since her most successful TV show to date, especially after it was ripped apart from her in season six, when the WB and UPN networks merged to create the CW, and shit was generally getting creatively stifling. Once the Palladino team lost control of the characters they had so lovingly rendered, fans quickly deemed season six (during which time Rory drops out of Yale and stops talking to Lorelai) by far the worst of the series—then again, that whole Rory sleeping with Dean as married man plotline in season five wasn’t all that palatable either.
By the end of season seven, things had gotten mildly back on track just as the show was coming to its final episode. It could be as a result of Gilmore Girls‘ bittersweet conclusion (but then, aren’t all conclusions that way?) that original cast members and creators are coming together to give audiences another dose of some of the two most verbose protagonists in the history of television.
While this is a generous gift, it is also a potentially damaging one—like giving a child too much candy when you should have just helped them stick to their vegetables. Not only is the format of the revival—slated to appear on Netflix—highly alarming (there will be four ninety minute episodes set during each season of one year), but also the possibility of exploring storylines better left to the imagination, like those involving Rory working on the Obama campaign trail and Luke and Lorelai getting back together. Lorelai could definitely do better, but, for whatever reason, fans are addicted to the pain of Luke’s acerbic “wit.” Moreover, Edward Herrmann is dead. One fears how the writers of the show might address this: a simple mention that Richard Gilmore dropped dead while golfing or a replacement grandpa à la Darren Stevens in Bewitched (one of many pop culture references made by Lorelai)? Although the open-endedness of Gilmore Girls left so many craving more, it is possible that some cravings are better off staved.
