"A Vineyard Valentine" (season 6, episode 15) And the townie hijinks - Kirk crashing Taylor’s car into Luke’s diner - are trying too hard to be whimsical there’s so much effort onscreen that the show feels tense where it wants to be comforting.ġ55. The show struggles to find its signature screwball pacing, and it can’t figure out how to circle around emotions without addressing them face on, as the earlier seasons did at their best. This is the first episode of Gilmore Girls written without Amy Sherman-Palladino at the helm, and boy does it show. Add to that the fact that the episode comes at the rocky beginning of the Palladino-less seventh season - and the fact that Lane’s fate falls into the show’s unpleasant track record of punishing women when they lose their virginity - and you have all the makings of Gilmore Girls’ worst episode.ġ56. It’s a heartbreaking ending to Lane’s arc, and what’s worse is that the show treats it as light comedy. Then she finds out she’s pregnant, meaning that she’ll have to put aside all the rock ’n’ roll dreams she’s strived toward over the past seven seasons. Lane, back from her honeymoon with Zach, announces that their first time together was so terrible that she has no plans to ever have sex again. There are some rough episodes of Gilmore Girls, but only this one casually destroys a beloved character’s life for no reason. "That's What You Get, Folks, for Makin' Whoopee" (season 7, episode 2) The very worst The look on Lane’s face is the look on all our faces. So I had to decide with fresh eyes what to do with this problem season. ![]() With the space of some distance, I no longer feel that’s the best place for them. (Again, I’ll reiterate, it was November 2016.) For the sake of journalistic ethics, I’ll list them here: “Winter” was No. The first time I ranked Gilmore Girls, under a combination of recency bias and severe emotional whiplash (look, it was November 2016), I gave the four revival episodes extremely high rankings. Moreover, they take place in an entirely different world: They’re dealing with an adult Rory and a middle-aged Lorelai, and that puts everything off balance. ![]() The ’ four episodes are structurally different than their predecessors, each clocking in at 90 minutes long and covering three months at a time, rather than the rapid 45-minute slice-of-life snippets that comprise the bulk of the show. It’s a stunningly consistent show that rarely hits a false note how do you differentiate between two really good episodes of a really good show? Sure, there are outliers, like the almost universally reviled “Vineyard Valentine” and the almost universally beloved “Bracebridge Dinner” but how do you decide if a “There’s the Rub” is better or worse than a “The Nanny and the Professor”? Do you lean more toward the aesthetic beauty of the early seasons, with their gorgeous tonal blend of warmth and melancholy, or toward the psychological complexity of the darker later seasons? What do you do with the anomaly that is season seven, the only season of the show not produced by showrunner Amy Sherman-Palladino and her husband and writing partner, Daniel Palladino?Īnd speaking of anomalies, there’s the problem of the Netflix revival A Year in the Life. Ranking Gilmore Girls was not an easy task. Gilmore Girls is a family drama, and it shines brightest when it’s delving into the fundamental trauma and dysfunction - and the warmth and the joy - of the Gilmore family. It tells us what the show is good at and, by extension, what matters to it. ![]() Ranking a TV show episode by episode reveals its bones. On the occasion of the show’s 20th anniversary, I wanted to look back at my original rankings and see what needed tweaking. I first ranked Gilmore Girls episode by episode back in 2016, as the Netflix revival Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life loomed. Now she’s raising her precocious teenage daughter Rory ( Alexis Bledel) in a whimsical small New England town and tentatively working toward reconciliation with her WASPy estranged parents, Emily ( Kelly Bishop) and Richard (the late Edward Herrmann). It’s a low-concept show: Lorelai Gilmore ( Lauren Graham) used to be a daughter of wealth and privilege. Gilmore Girls premiered 20 years ago on the WB, in the fall of 2000, and slowly grew into a sleeper hit. Every episode, even the very worst, has some weird, quirky jewel of a moment that makes the whole thing worth watching - even something as small as Rory casually roasting a marshmallow over her stove burner when she gets home from school, or Taylor showing off his horrible toupee. Every episode of Gilmore Girls has a grace note.
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