GILMORE GIRLS: SEASON ONE

REVIEWED BY CHARITY BISHOP

Our rating: 3 out of 5

Because of: language, thematic elements, sensuality

Rated:

One of the cutest television shows I've ever seen, Gilmore Girls follows the wacky lives of a mother and daughter in a small town. Lorelai Gilmore (Lauren Graham) is a single mom who made a mistake in high school and wound up with a wonderful daughter as a result. Rory (Alexis Bledel) is a sixteen year old all-American girl who has a crush on the boy in the supermarket, loves having a junk-food infiltrated movie night every once in awhile, and gets straight A's at her local school. Her mother enjoys an ongoing coffee feud with Luke (Scott Patterson), the owner of a greasy spoon in town, and manages an exclusive hotel where she is forced to endure the sarcastic comments of her French employee Michel Gerard (Yanic Truesdale).

Up until now everything has been fantastic in the Gilmore home but Rory's application to a snooty private school that will send her on the fast track to Harvard University comes with an enormous price tag attached... and to pay the bills Lorelai has to go begging to her multi-millionaire and up until now estranged parents. Thrilled to be back in her daughter's life again, her quarrelsome mother Emily (Kelly Bishop) insists on some stipulations in paying for private school. One of them is having her family to dinner every Friday night. Notorious for quarreling with her mother, Lorelai is far from pleased but if it will get Rory the career she wants, she'll suffer through anything... and will have to, since Emily hasn't changed in all these years. Controlling and pious to the hilt, she wants to have influence in everything from her granddaughter's party dresses to the food she eats. At the same time Rory has finally gotten a date with the checker boy and suddenly leaving her lowbrow school doesn't seem like such a good idea anymore.

Throw in a disastrous first meeting with the new headmaster, an elite prat only interested in her good looks, and an instant violent rivalry with one of the school's most popular students, and Rory is in for one miserable year. The only bright spot in her life comes with English Literature class and the charm of her favorite teacher (Scott Cohen). But even that becomes complicated when he starts dating her mother. There's also the humorous romance between Lorelai's cook and best friend Sookie and the vegetable farmer she's had a long-running feud with, and any number of minor incidents, from disastrous double dates to food fights. The series has the kind of charm that will make viewers smile, for it does a beautiful reversal of roles. At times Lorelai and Rory seem more like sisters than a mother and daughter, but there are also instances when mom has to put her foot down. Whatever the outcome, Rory does respect Lorelai and it shows. The relationship between Emily and her daughter is perilous but at times scales upwards to civility and in the meantime provides some excellent opportunities for bantering back and forth.

By far the show's greatest asset is its manipulation of the English language. There are more word wars here than cowboys in the wild west and all of them are exquisite. Linguists or just those with a fine appreciation for remarkable insults and wordplays will have a lot of fun forging through the funny, quirky dialogue. There are some issues but fortunately in the first season they're minimal. Mild language and abuse of deity makes up a large chunk of dialogue. Conversations revolve around bras, not having washed underwear for a week, and other related topics. Some sexual flirtations pass between Lorelai and her various boyfriends. Sometimes her funny anecdotes can be mildly vulgar. Rory and her boyfriend stay out all night after a dance. They fall asleep on a couch together in the dance studio. Both Emily and Lorelai accuse them of sexual behavior, even though it was entirely innocent. (Lorelai eventually comes around to acknowledging that she was wrong.) Lorelai's stance on her daughter's sexual activates is undermined by her ability to bed-hop. She has several encounters (heavily implied but not graphically shown) with Rory's teacher, and also her old boyfriend when he comes to town.

Lorelai's wild teen years and pregnancy is brought up on numerous occasions. For the most part her behavior is frowned on in retrospect but she wouldn't change it for the world, because it gave her Rory. Christianity takes a mild bashing due to a secondary character, one of Rory's friends who is "Korean and religious." Her Bible-thumping mother refuses to allow her daughter to date or even "think about boys." Lane references attending Vacation Bible School as if it's a punishment. The whole thing is rather tongue in cheek and not overly offensive. The boys at Rory's new school take to calling her "Mary" as a tongue in cheek reference to the "Virgin" Mary. Gilmore Girls is not perfect by any means but charm shines through its many downfalls.