Guilty Pleasures - Gilmore Girls

Another from Steve Taylor-Bryant for our Guilty Pleasures celebration. This time he talks about the Gilmore Girls...

Set in a storybook Connecticut town populated by an eclectic mix of dreamers, artists and everyday folk, this multigenerational drama about family and friendship centres around Lorelai Gilmore and her daughter, Rory. Lorelai owns the town's bed-and-breakfast, the Dragonfly Inn, with best friend/chef Sookie, and contends with weekly dinners with eccentric, well-off parents Richard and Emily Gilmore (who always have something to say about their daughter's life). After high school, Rory attends Yale University but frequently returns to Stars Hollow to visit her mom.

Gilmore Girls is one of those shows that really should have passed me by. When it was on, I was always working, sixteen to eighteen hour days were quite the norm in my chosen profession at the time, and I'm certainly not the target audience for a comedy drama about a single mother raising her daughter. And it was always on. Whichever hour or so I got as a nap break it was on, if I managed to finish early it was on, if I'd pulled an all nighters to finalise a new menu or make sure a new restaurant was ready to open its doors the next day it was on. It's the only show in existence that stalked me, or at least it felt that way for about six or seven years. And yet Gilmore Girls just seemed to lift my heart, clear my tired mind, and provide some much needed energy to continue the hum drum life I was leading.

As a show it wasn't flashy, full of effects, or even cast particularly well all the time, I'm looking at you Melissa McCarthy, but somehow Gilmore Girls just soothed me and made my troubles seem insignificant and my battles futile... and I still don't know why. I can't remember a stand out storyline, it's not as highly quotable as my usual choice of show and I couldn't really relate to either Lorelei Gilmore, the always watchable Lauren Graham, or her daughter Rory played by Alexis Bledel, I am neither a single mother nor raised by one. I'm not like or from the kind of family Lorelei was, although both Emily (Kelly Bishop) and Edward (Richard Herrmann) entertained me quite a lot, and I didn't really like the rest of the cast, I'm looking at you again Melissa McCarthy. This is a show that cast Sebastian Bach as someone other than Sebastian Bach for goodness sake, I'd drug test the casting chief immediately.

No, Gilmore Girls didn't reach me on an intellectual level, it was completely unrelatable on a realistic level, and was about situations I neither understood or cared for. But my word I couldn't stop watching. I was addicted. And it was always on.



Image IMDb.