When bosses at the US TV network The WB signed off on a new sitcom about a gloriously sarcastic, fiercely independent single mother and her brainy teenage daughter – and that was written by a woman – few would have imagined it would turn into one of the world’s most popular series. Yet Gilmore Girls, Amy Sherman-Palladino’s comedy about the spirited mother-daughter duo Lorelai and Rory – the former a high school drop-out who gave birth at 16 and consequently became estranged from her wealthy, Wasp-y family, the latter her Ivy League-bound daughter – has become just that.
Twenty five years since it first premiered, it endures. It remains one of Netflix’s most streamed shows globally. A viral moment at last month’s Emmy awards saw its stars, Lauren Graham and Alexis Bledel, reunite on stage to much applause. A new documentary about the show is currently in development. It could hardly be more fitting that the show, which has done more positive PR for the autumn season than every Nora Ephron rom com combined, is celebrating its anniversary in October.
Budget wasn’t its only original barrier to success. Gilmore Girls was released off the back of a golden age of American nuclear family sitcoms such as Full House, Roseanne, The Simpsons and Malcolm in the Middle, which revolved around typical, idealised characters: the hard-working father, domesticated mother and their wholesome, school- and sport-obsessed offspring.
A show about a thirtysomething woman who had dared to have sex and get pregnant as a teenager, only to grow up and not ruin her life was quietly revolutionary. Lorelai, with her inappropriately short denim cut-offs and endless spew of pop culture references, became a symbol of what female independence could look like if you refused to care what judgemental old people (Lorelai’s catty mother Emily and stuffy father Richard) thought of your choices. It’s difficult to imagine successive hit shows like One Tree Hill or Ginny and Georgia, both of which feature single parents, existing without it.
I grew up in Walsall, England, almost 4,000 miles away from where the Gilmore girls spent their days drinking coffee and scoffing takeaways in smalltown Connecticut. But as a young girl growing up in a single-parent household, the show changed my perception of my home life for good. Once I overlooked the show’s glaring improbabilities – how did Lorelai and Rory afford to buy 20 takeaways a week? – I found much that mirrored my life.
My mother, Louise, was a young mum, having had me when she was 26, and she was cool and supportive without ever being pushy. She has an affinity for Nineties grunge bands, leather jackets and trashy celebrity news stories; she has always been the best dressed, loudest and funniest person in any room she enters. Anyone who has seen Gilmore Girls will recognise many of those qualities in Lorelai: a character who arrived on our screens at a time when mothers were meant to be dowdy and subservient, more preoccupied with roasting joints of meat and attending PTA meetings than having a fulfilling life of her own.
But Lorelai’s insatiable confidence and lust for life didn’t quite translate to her geeky, eventually rather brattish daughter, but there remained the sense that here, at last, was a parent willing to overlook imperfections. In Netflix’s 2016 spin-off A Year in the Life, the news that an adult Rory – graduating from Yale and following Barack Obama on the campaign trail – is pregnant fails to faze her mother, having been through a similar experience.
Gilmore Girls made it easier to not feel ashamed that I didn’t have the type of father I always saw on the Disney Channel, harping on about his “little princess” or driving his truck to work every day. What a beautiful, special thing it is, I began to realise, to have a mother who was also a ready-made best friend and life partner; to grow up in a house, as Rory describes, filled “with love and fun and books and music”.
A quarter of a century since it first aired, the world is perhaps more in love with the Gilmore girls than ever. The show offers respite from our increasingly divided world. It’s difficult to feel stressed or sad while watching Lorelai and Rory bicker about pizza, knitwear and boyfriends, or seeing loveable supporting character Kirk Gleason embark on yet another whacky business scheme. The show is a window to a world we sometimes wish we lived in: cosy, safe and soundtracked by floppy-haired indie rock bands. Luckily for me I grew up in my own version of it.
[See also: The Hack is missing its heart]
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