A year in the life

I think my readership will be split down the middle upon reading the title: half of you will know exactly what I'm talking about, the other half will be wondering, or maybe even thinking that this will be a New Year's resolutions post. Sorry to disappoint, but this will be about something a bit more prosaic: the television series Gilmore Girls.
Now I've only written about a tv series once before, and with good reason. I hardly watch any television (by which I also mean; I hardly watch any Netflix, as that has become the standard substitute for watching anything for my generation). The most notable exceptions are Sherlock (I was poised for the start of the forth season last night) and Wie is de mol? (a brilliant Dutch programme in which contestants have to complete assignments while rooting out the mole in their middle). Otherwise, I don't really watch tv; I'd rather read a book. Or go to the movies. Or better still; hang out with actual other people.
This used to be very different. When I was a teenager, I would know exactly which series aired each evening, and either plan to see them or record them. Dawson's creek, Roswell, Friends, Sex and the City, Everwood; I've seen them all as they first aired in the Netherlands. But the most important of all, the series I watched and rewatched (on dvd) the most, and the one most of my friends watched with me, was Gilmore Girls.

For those of you who know what I'm talking about, you can skip the next three paragraphs. For the rest of you: I find it almost impossible that people have gotten to this point in their lives without knowing what Gilmore Girls is, but here goes; Gilmore Girls is a tv series about Lorelai Gilmore, who got pregnant at 16, moved out of her (rich) parent's house to the small village of Stars Hallow, and raised her daugther Rory on her own. The tv show starts when Rory has just turned 16 and has been accepted into a very prestigious high school, which will surely catapult her into Ivy League spheres. Lorelai has by that time managed to work herself up from a maid to the manager of the hotel she works. All this sounds very dramatically 'rags to riches', but it is brought with a big dose of fun, quirky characters, high speed talking, and more (cult) references you could ever manage to look up.
The series ran for seven seasons, after which it was discontinued. The original writer, Amy Sherman-Palladino, was somehow removed from the writing staff, and this caused an abrupt ending to the show, which is very noticeable in the last four or five episodes; everything is rushed along to a forced ending.
However, this was not the ending Amy had been planning for us all along, and as soon as the show had ended, people were muttering that it was sad to see such a brilliant show go in this way. Then, last year, there were rumours about a restart, with most of the original cast. Then, the show was bought by Netflix (hint: you can see all seven seaons there), and the rumours became reality: we would get four 1.5 hour episodes, written by Amy, with all the original cast, in a brand new series: Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life.

Right, now that we're all on the same page: as soon as they had annouced this for real, I had that weird combination of profound joy and bottomless anxiety. Joy upon getting another fix, another six whole hours of Gilmore Girls, and fear that they would mess it up. Because this is a series that is easily messed up. There is a certain tone, a certain way of communication and characterisation, that is very hard to get right. They missed it for a long chunk in the sixth season, and it was heartbreaking to watch.
Anyway, November 25th was a date underlined in my agenda, as I would binge-watch the entire season in one go, together with one of my best friends and fellow Gilmore Girls-rewatcher. And so we watched it. And we judged it. This was our baby, our Gilmore Girls experience, our many nights of sitting under a blanket, stuffing our faces with junk food, rewatching episodes we'd already seen five times. Had they messed it up?
The truth is; yes and no. There are many things I really liked about this new series, and many things I didn't like. I tried to put these into a pro/con list to come to some sort of final judgement (Rory does this a lot) but I don't think it really works that way; your overall opinion is more than just the longer list. So I'll describe some things instead. For those of you who haven't watched it, probably blantantly obviously, but better safe than sorry: there will be spoilers.

At first, it felt like slipping back into that familiar world again, like we'd never left. Lorelai gives Rory an update on everything that has happened in Stars Hallow, we meet some familiar faces (Lane! A super-thin Miss Patty! Kirk! Taylor! Michel! And he's married!), Lorelai has had a fight with her mother, Paris is still positively insane but good-hearted beneath it all, there is a weird Friday-night dinner, troubadours sing; all is well with the world.
Then, you realise what the main issue of the episode was; both Lorelai and Rory are searching. Still? At 48 and 32 respectively? Yes, they are still searching for what they want to do, who they want to be. Lorelai wondering whether she should have become a mother again, and Rory is an anchorless freelance writer, drifting between the US and London. Relationshipwise, Rory appears to have found a steady boyfriend, but she keeps forgetting him (seriously, they should have ended that joke after the first half an hour) and is also very much cheating on him. They are both still searching, still unhappy, but really, without any good reason. They should be happy. They're just full of their own first-world problems. They should get over themselves.
I realise that six hours of people who have cleaned up their lives and gotten their stuff together may have seemed tedious to the scriptwriters, but it wouldn't have been boring at all to the fans of the show. We just want to see all those characters happily settled in life, to peek in on how they're doing, and then silently move away again. Ironically, there is a very strong focus on Lorelai's and Rory's (forced) personal problems, and all those other characters we just get minute glimpses off, before they disappear again. I would have loved to know more about Lane, or Michel, or Jess, or Dean, or April, or any of them, really. Less drama, more story.
The only person whose life isn't going like they'd planned, but with good reason, is Emily. What I thought was really good about this series, is that they explicitly portray her as the third Gilmore Girl. Which she was all along, of course, but it somehow didn't really come across that well. But now, with Edward Herrmann gone, her character is also widowed. And searching. But Emily is the only one really willing to deal with the situation she finds herself in, to tackle her problems head-on, to invite new people into her life and share her grief with them. And in the end, I felt, she is the only one who truly finds happiness.
Speaking of the end, there is a bit of a bombshell there, of course. Those words were the exact words Amy had always wanted to end the series with, and they must have been really nice to hear at the end of season seven, but here they sounded hollow and unreal. Also, I was unaware of any mystery surrounding the father until a friend pointed it out to me: I was just assuming it would be Logan's. But she has that weird thing with the furry in the middle of the series, so it may well be a Wookiee baby. Which I just find annoying. What is with the open endings? Really, can't you let it go? To top it all off, Netflix posted a message referring to April's quest to find her father, hinting both at three possible fathers (but really, Paul?) and at new episodes. Let's hope they don't. Really, don't.

Like I said; an overall opinion isn't made up of only the number of good and bad things, and reading the above, you may well think I hated this new series. Which I didn't. There were many, many things I disliked about it, but the overall feeling it gave me was good. The atmosphere, the pacing, the characters, they all felt right. This truly was Gilmore Girls again, ten years later. The only sad part about it is; the main characters hadn't matured during those ten years.
And maybe that is the problem; we have. We have become ten years older. And where the drama of the original series is steeped in nostalgia, we see this series with our new, critical eye. And seen as such, it is lacking in some ways. Not all, obviously, and it is still a sibling of the original, but clearly the lesser sibling, the unsuccessful kid.
But in the end, I'm glad we now have this series, and have seen the ending Amy originally wanted, and had a chance to sneak a peek at all of their lives and the little town of Stars Hallow. After all, I've spend a lot of time there, and it's good to know it's still going strong.