After years of anticipation, Netflix has produced and released six new hours of Gilmore Girls. These new episodes should be enjoyable to watch, if only because they let us all revisit beloved characters and familiar settings.
But they’re also six terrible hours of television. They tear up and throw out just about everything good about the show that the fandom relished, in service of a thoughtless artistic vision ripped from crappy early-aughts movie musicals. It’s hard to even believe how bad they are.
The original Gilmore Girls is a Bush Two-era classic, an occasionally sappy drama about a mother-daughter friendship anchored by its characters’ rapid-fire dialogue and encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture. In its dealings with class, female ambition, and generational divides, it sometimes approached the big leagues of genuinely transcendent, moment-defining television.
the original series was the best thing we, the girls, had seen
It had flaws, sure — even the most adoring Gilmore Girls fan will concede that Rory was a little spoiled, and her mother Lorelai was a little immature, and that it’s weird as heck that they never bothered to fill the prop coffee cups with some kind of liquid. But it’s a cultural touchstone for millions of women for a reason: When it first came out, Gilmore Girls was the best thing we’d ever seen about mothers and daughters, and about girls who want to grow up to be not just successful, but important.
Neil Jacobs / Netflix
The reboot keeps much of the original creative team, with each episode written and directed by series creators Amy Sherman-Palladino and Dan Palladino. Casting director Jami Rudofsky, costume designer Brenda Maben, and producer Helen Pai are also notable holdovers, but change-ups in production design and cinematography stand out. The set has disorienting differences, mainly of scale, and much of the camera work is genuinely ridiculous. It looks like half of the series was shot from the angle of a security camera, and the other half was shot with hand-helds in extreme close-up. (Often peering directly up someone’s chin, Mr. Robot style.)