Gilmore Girls revival on Netflix

Every episode of Gilmore Girls has a grace note. 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.

Gilmore Girls premiered 20 years ago on the WB, in the fall of 2000, and slowly grew into a sleeper hit. It’s a low-concept show: Lorelai Gilmore (Lauren Graham) used to be a daughter of wealth and privilege. Then she got pregnant at 16. 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).

In 2015, New York magazine wrote about the terrible sexist stereotypes that attend Hollywood portrayals of female journalists — particularly their tendencies to jettison professionalism and ethical standards at whim in order to sleep with sources. “Would it kill Hollywood to give us one grown-up Rory Gilmore?” asked writer Marin Cogan.

But as the recent Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life revival has shown us, it turns out that a grown-up Rory Gilmore doesn’t subvert these stereotypes — she embodies them, along with a host of additional professional incompetencies no one saw coming.

Gilmore Girls is one of only a few American TV shows of the past 20 years to seriously acknowledge class.

On the surface, that’s sort of a bizarre statement; the show centers on the child of two rich parents, who leaves their moneyed life behind and ends up … still pretty rich. She owns her own inn and lives in a giant house, and her town is the sort of quirky oddball community that the rich probably vacation in. Gilmore Girls isn’t a show about upper versus lower classes. It’s about upper versus slightly less upper classes. Financial difficulty visits only rarely.

In the first-ever episode of Gilmore Girls, 15-year-old Rory Gilmore (Alexis Bledel) impulsively decides, after meeting her future first boyfriend, Dean, that she doesn’t want to attend the elite prep school she’s been dreaming about.

Her mom, Lorelai (Lauren Graham), reacts to this news by pointing out how similar they are. “After all, you’re me,” she tells her daughter: “someone willing to throw important life experiences out the window to be with a guy.”

Early in Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, Rory Gilmore (Alexis Bledel) is trying to answer a phone call, with little success. Could it be — as her mother, Lorelai (Lauren Graham), surmises — because the little burg of Stars Hollow, Connecticut, where the pair resides, has bad reception due to the giant snow globe it exists within?

It’s a joke, of course. Gilmore Girls is not revealed, at least at this juncture, to be a stealth sequel to Under the Dome. But it’s a particularly telling one at this moment in pop culture, in the Year of Our Bubble 2016.

Netflix’s Gilmore Girls revival is providing closure in a lot of ways. But for obsessive fans of the show, the most important one is that it’s finally telling us what the final four words are.

During Gilmore Girls’ broadcast run, showrunner Amy Sherman-Palladino would tell reporters that she knew exactly how she planned to end the show, down to the final four words. But Sherman-Palladino was ousted before the show’s last season, and she didn’t get to use her planned final four words. Until now.

If you know anything about Gilmore Girls, it’s probably that Gilmore Girls is “the show with all the talking.” Specifically, all the fast talking.

“Anything said quickly can seem wittier than it is!” insists a MADtv parody, as its faux Gilmore girls trade quips at breakneck speed. The characters on the show talk so fast that producers had to hire a dialogue coach to get the actors up to speed. They talk so fast that episode scripts were routinely 80 pages long, even though the typical length of an hour-long TV episode script is 40 or 50 pages.

In May 2007, a young reporter named Rory Gilmore took a bus from Connecticut to Iowa to start her very first job in journalism, covering the presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama for a small online outlet. To those who knew her, it must have come as a surprise. Rory had always been a Hillary Clinton supporter, and was even planning on writing her application essay to Harvard on Clinton before someone told her just how common a subject Clinton was.

But like many young men and women of her generation, Rory’s fate was about to become entangled with that of the young black senator from Chicago with a funny name. We know what happened to him, but Rory’s fate was left open, since she’s not a real person. She’s one of the two Gilmore Girls. The episode where Rory goes off to follow the Obama campaign was the series finale, and she was never heard from again. Until now.

When Gilmore Girls was on the air between 2000 and 2007, there were few bigger fans of the series than me. The series was sharp and funny, and it fell squarely within one of my favorite genres: the small-town show.

But I’ve been worried about the Netflix reboot Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life pretty much since it was announced. Some of this stems from my reflexive dislike of reboots and remakes of beloved TV shows; after so much time away, it’s difficult for a series to recapture its magic, because a lot of what makes a TV show successful relies on an alchemy that’s impossible to replicate.

Singer-songwriter Sam Phillips had never worked on scores for film or television before she was hired to compose the music for Gilmore Girls in 2000, right after the show’s pilot was picked up to series by the now-defunct WB network. Over the course of Gilmore Girls’ (original) seven-season run, she developed music that became as much a part of the world of Stars Hollow as fast-paced dialogue and caffeine addictions.

Since the show ended in 2007, Phillips has also composed music for the late, great Bunheads, another show by Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino, and released two albums and five EPs. But when Netflix announced it would be reviving Gilmore Girls for a special four-episode miniseries titled Gilmore Girls: A Day in the Life, she couldn’t wait to return.

On November 25, just after midnight on the West Coast, Netflix will release all four episodes of Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, the highly anticipated revival of the WB series Gilmore Girls, which ran from 2000 to 2007. A Year in the Life consists of four 90-minute episodes, each covering a single season, beginning with “Winter” and ending with “Fall.” It’s helmed by Amy Sherman-Palladino, who created the show and ran the first six seasons of the seven-season broadcast run.

To whet your appetite, we’re offering you a few tidbits about what you can expect from the revival. We can’t tell you anything major, like The Final Four Words, but we have five minor spoilers for you below. Stop reading now if you want to go into the revival completely cold.

Ever since the news broke that Gilmore Girls would get a new life on Netflix nine years after ending its run in 2007, speculation has been running wild. Will Luke and Lorelai live happily ever after? Will Rory end up with Jess, Dean, or Logan, or someone else entirely? And most importantly: What will those final four words be?

We may not know the answers to those questions yet, but we do know lots of other things about the revival. If you want to go into the new episodes completely unspoiled, turn away now, because here is everything we know so far about the Gilmore Girls revival, slated to debut at the end of this year. (We’ll update this post as new information becomes available.)

The actual first trailer for the Gilmore Girls Netflix revival is here.

“But wait,” you say. “Didn’t that already come out? Lorelai and Rory kept bantering about late-night comedians and corpse flowers?”

Pour yourself a cup of coffee and prepare to settle in for some fast talking, because I have some very exciting news for you: We finally know when Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life will debut — and we’ve got the first peek at what it’s going to look like.

Netflix has announced that its highly anticipated Gilmore Girls revival will premiere globally on Thanksgiving weekend: November 25, 2016, at 12:01 am Pacific. As previously announced, A Year in the Life will consist of four 90-minute episodes. Each one will cover a different season of the year, with the first taking place in winter and last taking place in the fall.

The power of the nostalgia machine just might be real: The dearly departed WB series Gilmore Girls is heavily rumored to be getting ready to ride again — and this time, it will be streaming.

While Netflix is not commenting yet, TV Line reports that Netflix has made a deal with Warner Bros to bring the series back for four 90-minute episodes, or, essentially, four movies. According to Michael Ausiello, the revival will take place over one year, with each episode following Lorelei, Rory, and their motormouthed friends through a different season. (We hear Stars Hollow is lovely in the autumn.)

Every season of Gilmore Girls arrives on Netflix Wednesday, and the series is more than worth watching in its entirety. But watching all seven seasons, each with 22 episodes at 44 minutes a piece, is no easy adventure to embark on, so we’ve laid out the perfect episodes to end each session of your binge and break each season into disparate, easily digestible chunks. With this schedule, you can make it through the whole series in 20 sessions. It’s a binge that will go quickly enough to increase your conversational speed to Gilmore levels, but not so quickly as to push the rate past that which is comprehensible by the human ear.

If you want to only watch one episode, we’ve got you covered there, too. But if you need to see the whole series, here are your guidelines: