By Ellie Gavin || Managing Editor
This month, Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, was released on Netflix. The series, which consisted of four hour-and-a-half long episodes, was a revival of the original beloved series which has been off the air for nine years.
The four installments followed Rory and Lorelai throughout a year in Star’s Hollow. Rory is returning home to live with her mother after hitting a bump in the road of her journalistic career. Lorelai, who has been living with long-term boyfriend Luke, and of course, beloved dog Paul Anka. The Gilmore ladies have been coping with the recent death of Lorelai’s father.
This revival, while entertaining and indulgent for those who have been missing the show dearly for the last nine years, had some issues, especially regarding Rory’s character staying consistent with the person fans have come to know and love. Some of the story lines regarding her personal life seem to stray a little too far away from the kind, albeit flawed, person that we know Rory to be. Rory, along with her friends and family members, consistently forgets that her boyfriend exists. She is having a long-term affair with ex-boyfriend Logan Huntzberger, who lives in London and is engaged to be married.
Rory has never been a perfect character, and she doesn’t need to be. Her flaws are what male her interesting. Throughout the original series, we have seen Rory make some pretty big ethical slip-ups, including losing her virginity to Dean while he is engaged to another woman, missing her mother’s graduation to see her boyfriend, Jess, in New York, and stealing a boat. All of these mistakes show us that Rory, while a kind person with a good heart, is a human being who can be impulsive and maybe a little bit selfish at times. However, despite her mistakes, Rory has always been a character with a moral compass. Some of her actions in the revival, hoever, just make her seem callous, and are frankly out of character. It just didn’t feel like Rory.
At points, the revival wastes time on plot lines that seem pointless when it could be delving into more interesting issue: couldn’t they have spent more time focusing on Rory’s relationship with her father rather than dedicating twenty minutes to Sutton Foster singing about the history of Stars Hollow? It felt like a waste of time.
While admittedly overly nostalgic in some moments, the revival does a few things very well; all three of the Gilmore women are given interesting and complex plot lines, including the complexities of Lorelai’s relationship with her parents, specifically her mother, that resurface in the wake of Richard’s death, Rory’s struggle to find out exactly what she wants and who she is, both in her career and her personal life, and Emily’s struggle to find out who she is when she is no longer Richard’s wife after fifty years of marriage. Amid all of the seemingly silly and unrealistic aspects of life in Stars Hollow, it is the show’s handling of these issues that make the sugar-coated world of Gilmore Girls undeniably real.
Junior Ellie Gavin is the Managing Editor. Her email is fgavin@fandm.edu.