Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life

Stars Hollow, Connecticut, 2016. It's been almost nine years since Rory Gilmore graduated from Yale with a bright, glittering career in journalism ahead of her. However, that potential has not entirely been fulfilled. She's had lots of individual articles published but hasn't held down a steady staff position. Conversely, her mother's career as the manager of the successful Dragonfly Inn continues to be successful. Rory's listlessness sees her making frequent return trips home over the course of a year, as she tries to work out what step next to take in her life.

Reunion shows are always an iffy proposition. A show is really popular and has a dedicated fanbase, running for years and hundreds of episodes, then it ends, usually because of writer/actor burnout or cost reasons. Then nostalgia kicks in and, years or decades later, the show comes back for a movie, a mini-series or even a multi-season run. Sometimes this works (Twin Peaks: The Return), but more often it's a miserable failure (The X-Files).

More interesting is when a show is cut off before its intended end date and the ending fans get isn't the one the creators planned. With Gilmore Girls, showrunner and creator Amy Sherman-Palladino left the show at the end of Season 6 after a falling-out with the network. She'd wanted two more, shorter seasons to wrap everything up satisfyingly but the network only offered her one more, normal-length season. Season 7 was handled by a different writing team, who brought the show to a solid, but not spectacular, ending. But Sherman-Palladino always felt cheated of the "proper" ending she'd envisaged for the show. When Gilmore Girls became an early breakout hit on Netflix, the streamer bought the rights and offered her the chance to come back and provide the ending she'd always wanted.

The problems, of course, were that (1) Season 7 had taken the show way off from where Sherman-Palladino had planned and (2) nine years had passed since the last episode was filmed. To bridge the gap, Sherman-Palladino only paid lip service to a lot of Season 7 plot points to get the story to where she wanted. The time gap became something of a virtue, by giving more poignancy to what the characters were doing and to what degree they'd improved their lives or failed to do so since the original run.

The most disappointing part of the revival for many fans - although it's also kind of the point - is that Rory seems to be spinning her wheels. Having developed from a 16-year-old teenager to a self-confident 22-year-old university graduate with a job on the Obama election press trail, A Year in the Life sees 32-year-old Rory as listless and unsatisfied. She has a relationship so dull she keeps forgetting she's in it (a one-scene funny gag pushed beyond breaking point), she's still having an on-off affair with one of her exes from her teenage years because she can't just move on, and although she's writing and getting published, it's intermittent and separated by bouts of effective joblessness. Only Rory's very rich grandparents keep her head above water. Rory's situation is contrasted with her mother Lorelai's, who was also 32 in the first season of Gilmore Girls and was in a much happier, more successful place, despite the lack of opportunities. One of the show's messages is that education and money (although helpful) can't buy you happiness, you need to find that yourself, but it perhaps goes overboard in heaping dissatisfaction on Rory.

Most of the other main characters do come off better. Lorelai and Luke having relationship problems (yet again) may make you want to scream, but at least here they're mild ones, and are more organically the issues that come up after you've been in a relationship for a decade that's become very comfortable and safe and you're not sure if that's a good thing or not. Paris is the most MVP here, having forged a new career for herself where she is very successful and has a good storyline, if only confined to the first two episodes. Michel also has some great material, after being arguably the least-well-served main castmember in the original series.

However, too many characters have too little material. Lane has maybe two scenes of consequence and her bandmembers virtually no screentime. Sookie has literally one scene, which feels like a huge absence given her importance to the original show, but is possibly an unavoidable outcome of Melissa McCathy's career becoming so huge in the meantime. Jess feels like he could have been a more important character in the story, and his few scenes are probably the best in the show, particularly a surprisingly powerful two-hander with him and Luke. Whether Milo Ventimiglia (who was about to start shooting This is Us at the time) had availability issues as well is unclear. Other characters appear randomly for a single scene just to check in, often very artificially. The mini-series is the length of eight "normal" episodes, which normally would be easily enough time to give everyone more time in the sun.

There's also a typical "Stars Hollow goes bonkers over some event" storyline which feels like an awkward fit, especially when several scenes related to it go on for far too long and make your eyes glaze over.

For all of that, there is some good stuff here. There's quite a few gags that land well, the actors are still all on good form, and the storyline revolving around the recent death of Richard Gilmore and how his widow Emily reacts to that gives Kelly Bishop some of her finest acting moments on the show to date. There's some lovely poignancy in that storyline (particularly a scene that brings the late Edward Herrmann back via nicely-used stock footage) and it's good to see her relationship with Lorelai finally evolving to something more respectful than continuously antagonistic. And, for all the mini-series gets roasted for being "miserable," actually most of the characters are in reasonably happy places, even if only by their standards rather than the viewer's. The ending and much-mooted (if also much-guessed) final line are appropriate, and leaves the show on an interesting note. If it comes back again in the future (once the creators are done with The Marvellous Mrs. Maisel), it could be interesting, but if not, it'd be fine.

Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life (***½) is a mixed bag and not entirely successful, but for every storyline or character arc that's unsatisfying, there's several more that do work, some good gags and some outstanding performances. The mini-series is available to watch now on Netflix worldwide.

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