Coffee and Poptarts

As a Television/Radio major, one of the hardest questions that you can be asked is, “What is your favorite television show?” There are just so many options and so much room for ridicule. Often when thinking about my answer to this question I quickly flip through all my guilty pleasures and think “Oh no, I can’t ever mention I watch that, that’s so embarrassing”. Because what it comes down to is, no Park student wants to admit that after spending time and money studying television that they regularly watch Teen Mom 2. I feel as if I can finally, confidently admit out loud that my all-time favorite television series will always be, Gilmore Girls.

Gilmore Girls is a comedy-drama that started on the WB on October 5, 2000 and ended on the CW after it’s seventh season. The concept of this show itself is purely original in the simplest way. The show is about a mother and daughter who are best friends and live in a small, quirky town known as Stars Hollow, Connecticut. The mother, Lorelai, is a fast-talking, coffee guzzling, PopTart loving, quirky woman who treats her intelligent, quick daughter, Rory, more like a best friend than her child. The idea of the show is simple, however, the writing and the characters make this show exceedingly unique.

Gilmore Girls’ tagline is, appropriately, “Life’s short. Talk fast.” This is honestly one of the best ways to sum up the dialogue on this show. Rory and Lorelei talk in an extremely fast-paced manner filled with endless pop-culture references, which closely resembles the conversations between characters on “The Newsroom”. In fact, due to the fast-paced dialogue on this show, the average script for one single episode is 75 to 80 pages compared to the standard hour-long television show which is about 45 to 50 pages. In an interview, the writer of the show, Amy Sherman-Palladino declared, “TV is all about speed. TV is fast and furious. It’s gunslinger territory”. The writing on the show offers a lot of intellectual conversation and situational humor. Gilmore Girls is also well-known for using a master shot filming style, which frames the characters and dialogue together in one, long take. This shot truly makes the viewer focus on the dialogue rather than the action, unlike other drama series.

Second to the writing, what made this show so likable is that we each secretly wanted to be a Gilmore Girl. The copious amounts of coffee, the endless supply of PopTarts and the mother-daughter duo are all aspects of the show that are so heartwarming, simple, and easy to relate to. So why, if the plot is so simple, is this idea so difficult to reproduce? Many shows have tried to repeat the Gilmore Girl’s theme and have hopelessly failed. Amy Sherman-Palladino even tried to write a new series on ABC Family called “Bunheads”.  The plot, the witty dialogue, the small town, the quirky characters and even the same actresses make this show blatantly similar to Gilmore Girls. However, unlike Gilmore Girls, the show quickly fizzled and was canceled as of recent. In a review in “The Week”, Monika Bartyzel states, “For all its similarities to Gilmore Girls, Bunheads didn't start with the clear vision that structured Gilmore Girls”.  

The producers of Gilmore Girls were obvious about their motive from the start. They wanted to prove that mother and daughter could coexist in a world where boys, friends, the past and other dangerous topics were all laid out on the table. They wanted to prove that wit and intelligence were attractive and essential traits. And most importantly, they wanted to prove the necessity of coffee and PopTarts.