Fast-paced, witty dialogue. Long strings of pop culture references. Three generations of the Gilmore women fighting for their place in the world.
“Gilmore Girls” is a rare phenomenon — it masters the formula to hook viewers in just its first episode.
John Cabrera, an actor, screenwriter and director who played Brian Fuller on “Gilmore Girls,” says it seems obvious now that, of course, the show would become a massive hit.
“The dialogue is just so sticky that you can’t stop watching,” Cabrera says. “It’s designed to kind of keep you hooked. It’s funny, witty and the beats are so tightly woven together that the next thing you know, the show’s over, and you’re like, ‘Oh my God, I just watched that whole thing.’”
The show, which originally aired on The WB and lasted from 2000 – 2007, holds a special place in many mothers’ and daughters’ hearts.
It follows the lives and relationships of single mom Lorelai Gilmore and her daughter Rory Gilmore as Rory navigates high school, college, her relationship with her grandparents, Emily Gilmore and Richard Gilmore and more.
For many, the show was the first time they saw characters like themselves portrayed on TV.
“It felt like, oh, this show is addressing what my life is like, more than my friends who have two parents in the house,” Rachel Natale, an Illinois-based “Gilmore Girls” fan, says.
Today, the show is celebrating over 25 years of serving as a place for viewers to escape, relate and relax. It was the ninth-most-streamed show of 2022, with 20.8 billion minutes viewed, according to Nielsen.
But what exactly is this formula the show seems to uncover, and how did this story about a small town and its eccentric, happy characters become such a staple in so many people’s lives?
The show’s popularity
Cabrera says when the cast was filming the show, they had no inkling of what it would turn into.
“In some of the later years, you could feel that there was a real love for the show that was special and different, but I don’t think anybody really had an idea that it was going to grow as large as it has,” he says.
The show and its actors won and were nominated for numerous awards throughout the years, including a 2002 Golden Globe nomination, a 2005 nomination for the People’s Choice Awards and 2001 and 2002 nominations for the Screen Actors Guild Awards.
But these awards only scratched the surface of the legacy “Gilmore Girls” was creating.
Kristine Eckart, author of “Meet Me at Luke’s: Lessons in Life and Love from Gilmore Girls” and founder of “The Gilmore Book Club,” says the show is timeless because people will always be able to relate to the storylines in it: the mother-daughter and best friend relationships and the overall themes like money, relationships and purpose.
“Pop culture shapes who we are and how that affects the decisions that we make and our feelings and our emotions, and that’s why people attach to these shows so ferociously,” she says. “It’s reflecting something that’s inside us already back to us in a different way.”
The characters in “Gilmore Girls” are anything but one-dimensional. Cabrera says the show’s continued popularity has to be because mothers and daughters have always watched it together.
“Mothers are introducing the show to their daughters at every generation,” he says.
“As you pass into a new generation yourself, as you become a mother, you transition from relating to the Rory character into relating to the Lorelai character, and as you transition out of Lorelai into being a grandmother, then you start to relate to the Emily character, and that is just a brilliant way of creating this almost conveyor belt of generations.”
On top of all this, Cabrera says “Gilmore Girls” serves almost as a fantasy land for viewers to fall into.
“It makes sense, in hindsight, why a show like ‘Gilmore Girls’ that’s about a community of people and about friendships and a little town and all that, how it would work so perfectly,” he says.
Stars Hollow is the perfect little town where everyone is friends, loves each other, gets along and lives happy lives with no real conflict. Rory is the “golden child” of the town, and everyone loves her in a way they don’t love anybody else, Cabrera describes.
Connecting with the characters
Natale has always watched the show with her mom and sister, two people she is very close to, and she was originally intrigued because her mom was a single mom, just like Lorelai, and she would also tell her mom everything, just like Rory did.
When her mom got remarried, it was right around the time they were watching the show and seeing Lorelai get engaged to Max Medina, a teacher at Rory’s high school.
“Max sleeps over that first night, and Lorelai comes down to Rory’s bed and wakes her up in the middle of the night,” Natale recalls.
“She’s like, ‘This is weird. There’s a guy here. It won’t be the me and you club anymore,’ … That felt really relevant, like, there’s a man coming into this situation that has been just the three of us girls.”
Her mom was only remarried to this man for a short time, and it was not a great marriage, Natale says.
“He would go out on Thursday nights and go play basketball, which was the night that ‘Gilmore Girls’ was on,” she says. “I remember we’d get excited to be like, ‘Oh, we could watch it together,’ kind of in the midst of a bad situation. I mean, it sounds weird to say, but it was like our little refuge of the three of us … It was our show.”
She also related to Rory, as they were both good at school and not partiers. When Rory gets her first boyfriend, Dean Forester, and he says “I love you” for the first time on their anniversary, Natale relates deeply to Rory not being able to say it back.
“I remember when I was with my boyfriend when I was 15/16, him saying ‘I love you’ and me being like, ‘I don’t know if I can say that’ because it meant a lot. It had a weight to me that it didn’t have to him.”
Rachael Jackson, a single mom with a 10-year-old daughter, Nora Jackson, also first watched “Gilmore Girls” as it was airing when she was 18, and now, at 38, she’s still rewatching.
At first, she related to Rory’s character, as they were both straight-A students, never got into trouble and would much rather hang out in a coffee shop than go out partying.
Now, as a mom, she says it hits totally differently. She’s inspired by Lorelai’s parenting, and it feels full-circle to still be watching and relating to a different character.
“It’s interesting to see me sort of fall into her place,” Jackson says. “Being a single mom with a daughter, it’s kind of hard. The line gets kind of blurred between friend and mom because it’s just me and her all the time.”
“I want to be her pal, but I also want to give her direction and advice. So I think being able to watch Lorelai and look up to her and see how she does things is very inspiring.”
She relates to other relationships in the show, too, as she says Nora’s father is similar to Christopher, Rory’s father, who is not very involved in their lives. Jackson’s mom is also similar to Lorelai’s mom, Emily Gilmore, who is very type-A, structured and formal.
“I think the biggest thing I try to emulate with Lorelai and Rory’s relationship is just the openness between them,” Jackson says. “I don’t want Nora to feel like she can’t come tell me things. I want her to be able to tell me everything.”
Replayability
25 years later, Natale says she’s still rewatching and having new thoughts about the show each time — so much so that she started the “Gilmored” podcast in 2023.
On an indefinite hiatus, the podcast, co-hosted by Lindsey Jodts, showed her how many people of all ages and generations have watched the show.
“I think there’s something weird too about that rewatch of, like, you watch it through who you are and what the story is the first time when you watch it, and then when you rewatch it, you can really dissect it, and you’ve changed,” Natale says.
“There are some things that I’m like, ‘Oh, now I see that completely differently,’ and so I think just that kind of helps me see my own growth, weirdly.”
She says she thinks the show has lasted so long for her because of its quippiness, wittiness, one-liners and quotability.
“The replayability, to me, is part of a testament to the writing and the fact that the storylines are pretty timeless,” Natale says. “It feels relevant today too because those are things people go through — relationships with their parents, with significant others, with people, with friends, with work.”
Jackson says the show is also a source of comfort, as it’s “from a happy time.”
“There are cell phones, but not everybody’s scrolling and taking pictures for Instagram. People are just in the moment,” she says.” They’re at the diner, they’re talking to friends, they’re visiting friends, everything’s walkable — it’s just kind of the dream life. Who wouldn’t want to live there?”
This “fantasy” aspect, Cabrera says, is balanced well with reality. And when reality hits in the show, it hits hard.
A realistic storyline
As the series goes on, the fantasy of the Gilmores’ perfect life in Stars Hollow is shattered.
Rory starts to make mistakes — because she’s a real person. She goes off to college at Yale to study journalism, gets in a big fight with her mom, drops out and even steals a yacht.
Lorelai isn’t the best mom at times, and she often emotionally leans on Rory too much. Her boundaries are often too laid-back, and Natale says she can also be a bit selfish and immature sometimes.
Rory eventually grows up to take over the Stars Hollow Gazette, the town’s local newspaper.
Cabrera says many fans were disappointed in how Rory ended up, as she always dreamed of becoming a great, world-renowned journalist.
But, he says, the paper was historic, and it needed a hero to build it back up.
“You don’t think that that paper is going to be incredible within the next couple years?” he asks. “It could end up being one of the best papers in the region, right?”
The fact that the seven-season series ends up right where it started — back in Stars Hollow — feels right for Rory, even if it’s not what fans pictured for her character. She ends up in the place where she is most loved and adored. Fans know that any person in that town would give her the shirt off their back if it meant it would make her happy.
Cabrera thinks so, too.
“I think it’s starting to become pretty clear to most folks who are on the show that if you did anything on the show, even if you were some small character that came that was only in one episode, that you got to be a part of television history, that a show like this will be in the history books,” he says.
Lauren Cohen is a writer. Contact her at [email protected]
