Gilmore Girls
The mother-daughter show that talked faster than anything else on television. Lorelai and Rory Gilmore, a small Connecticut town full of lovable cranks, Luke's coffee, Friday-night dinners — Gilmore Girls premiered on The WB in 2000 as an underdog and became the comfort-watch a whole generation never stopped rewatching.
When Gilmore Girls premiered on October 5, 2000, a dramedy about a small-town inn manager and her teenage daughter was an unlikely flagship for The WB. But creator Amy Sherman-Palladino built something nobody else was making: a show whose central love story was a friendship between a mother and her kid. Lauren Graham's Lorelai and Alexis Bledel's Rory volleyed pop-culture references at auctioneer speed — scripts averaged around 80 pages an episode when a typical hour of TV ran 55 to 60 — and Carole King's "Where You Lead," re-sung as a duet with her own daughter Louise Goffin, framed the whole thing as a family affair.
Stars Hollow, the fictional Connecticut town around them, became a character in its own right, and the weekly rhythms — Luke's Diner, town meetings, Friday-night dinners at grandparents Emily and Richard's mansion — gave seven seasons their structure. The show ran 153 episodes, finishing on May 15, 2007 on The CW after The WB merged out of existence in 2006.
Then syndication and streaming turned it into something bigger than it ever was on air: the default comfort show, autumn-scented and endlessly rewatchable. Netflix's four-part revival, Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, arrived November 25, 2016 and proved the appetite had only grown — people still just wanted to hear Lorelai and Rory talk.
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