{"id":12435,"date":"2009-10-08T02:44:24","date_gmt":"2009-10-08T09:44:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2009\/10\/08\/12435.html"},"modified":"2009-10-08T02:44:24","modified_gmt":"2009-10-08T09:44:24","slug":"a-farewell-to-gilmores-or-seve","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2009\/10\/08\/a-farewell-to-gilmores-or-seve\/","title":{"rendered":"A farewell to Gilmores, or, seven years in eight months"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Back in early February, I finally watched the first few episodes of Gilmore Girls<\/cite>.<\/p>\n

Most people I tell this to have the same reaction I had when someone first mentioned this show to me: \"Wait, you mean that sitcom about older women in Florida?\"<\/p>\n

To which the answer is, no, you're thinking of The Golden Girls<\/a><\/cite>, and that's a completely unrelated and very different show. (Also, Golden Girls<\/cite> ran in the '80s and early '90s, while Gilmore Girls<\/cite> ran from 2000 through 2007.)<\/cite><\/p>\n

(Also completely unrelated: the movie Happy Gilmore<\/cite>.)<\/p>\n

Gilmore Girls<\/cite> is about 32-year-old Lorelai Gilmore (yes, her name is spelled that way) and her 16-year-old daughter Rory, and their lives in the small fictional Connecticut town of Stars Hollow. (Well, those are their ages at the start of the series; the characters age normally over the seven-year run.)<\/p>\n

It's not a sitcom; it's a comedy\/drama, with each episode about 45 minutes long (without commercials).<\/p>\n

And it's one of my favorite TV shows.<\/p>\n

It's funny and charming and sweet and romantic and sad and quirky and compelling. It's occasionally annoying; there were weak spots now and then. But not many, and they never lasted very long.<\/p>\n

It has some great writing, and some of the fastest dialogue ever spoken on TV. I haven't compared words-per-minute between Gilmore Girls<\/cite> and His Girl Friday<\/cite>, but it wouldn't surprise me if the dialogue ran at similar speeds.<\/p>\n

And, above all, it has a bunch of great characters, most especially the two at its heart, Lorelai and Rory. And a wonderful mother\/daughter dynamic that I'm told provided some common ground for some real-life mothers and daughters who could sit down and watch the show together even if they didn't have a lot else in common.<\/p>\n

I watched the first few episodes from Netflix; somewhere partway through season one, I got tired of having to wait for new episodes to arrive and bought the whole seven-season run in seven DVD box sets.<\/p>\n

And for the past eight months, I've been watching an episode every day or two, on average. Twenty-two episodes per season times seven seasons adds up to 154 episodes.<\/p>\n

Tonight, I watched the final two episodes.<\/p>\n

There were a few plot choices I wouldn't have made, including one major significant one that I was sad about. But overall, I'd say they provided a fitting capstone to a superb seven-year run. I cried a lot, especially in that last episode. I'm guessing that a lot of people who watched the show while it was running (from 2000 through 2007) had even stronger reactions, after spending seven years of their lives with these characters.<\/p>\n

I've been taking notes along the way, including writing down some of my favorite dialogue; I may eventually put all that into some blog entries. But not tonight; time for me to go to sleep.<\/p>\n

Thanks once again to all who recommended the show to me over the years before I finally watched it, especially Karen (who still has never recommended a movie or TV show to me that I haven't liked) and Susan.<\/p>\n

And thanks also to Mary Anne and Michael for comments (and some discussion) along the way.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back in early February, I finally watched the first few episodes of Gilmore Girls. Most people I tell this to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-television"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12435"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12435\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}