As much as it pains me, I've given up my Tuesday night at 8 o'clock TV appointment. I'm done with Gilmore Girls. It's not just that this season has shown such a marked drop in quality of dialogue, costuming, etc., it goes much deeper. I've actually spent some time thinking about this recently, and I was trying to figure when it was that, for me, Gilmore Girls jumped the shark.
It was when Rory lost her virginity to Dean, who was a married man. The argument has been made to me that that choice made her more real, even more relatable, and less perfect, but I firmly disagree. It put a pall on everything, because this is behavior I find unforgiveable. It seems to me that Lorelai would have taught her daughter not to fish off another woman's pier. And this is coming from someone who has cheated in the past, repeatedly in my younger years, which maybe makes me a hypocrite. I never slept with a married man (to my knowledge) but I slept around on my first husband, and the fact that I was miserable in that marriage and he was a psychopath still doesn't make it right.
But I'm not talking about me, I'm talking about Gilmore Girls. Rory sleeping with Dean set things in motion, I think, that really killed the show for me, long before Amy Sherman Palladino (whose absence really shows in the dialogue) left. First there was Rory's ongoing affair with Dean which just got less forgiveable to me time went on. Then there was the long estrangement between Lorelai and Rory that just went on endlessly, and when it was finally over, it just wasn't the same.
Then there was April, Luke's previously unknown daughter. I hate to refer to a child actor as charmless, so I won't, but the character certainly is. That kid just makes me want to throw things, and Luke's response of shutting Lorelai (to whom he was engaged) out of that part of his life was unbelievable to me. Yeah, he's Luke, he's private, but he had opened himself up to Lorelai. That he would push her away like that? I didn't buy it. Still don't.
So after that debacle, I was happy when Lorelai found love with Christopher, Rory's father, her first love. I liked them together. They had history and way more chemistry than Luke and Lorelai. When they got married, I was happy and hopeful that they would work it out. But no, the "we want Luke and Lorelai together no matter what" crowd would seem to be winning. If Lore had not married Chris in Paris, if she'd have said no, then maybe, and it's a huge MAYBE, I could get behind the L&L pairing. After all, from the beginning there was a "will they or won't they" vibe between Luke and Lorelai. Over the years, I went back and forth as to whether or not I wanted that to happen. Getting the main characters together ruins a lot of TV relationships (Dave and Maddie from Moonlighting; Sam and Diane from Cheers), but for a while I was good with Luke and Lorelai. But she married Chris. They're newlyweds for Pete's sake. Marrying them off just to break them up doesn't sit well with me (and I'm not a particular fan of the institution of marriage these days). Pardon me if I sound old fashioned, but they made a promise. And I know, better than lots of people, that promises can't always be kept, but the speed with which this seems to be happening is enough to turn my stomach.
So I'm done. I doubt that anyone involved in the production of the show cares that I'm done. After all, I'm a bit old for their target demographic (which I find insulting, because at 42, I've still got lots of years left in me). But I care. Tonight at 8 o'clock when Amanda sits down to watch the show, I'll be sad. And truthfully, that's partly because there's nothing else on that I'm interested in on Tuesday night at 8 o'clock.
At least House is new at 9. That's a little something.
No comments:
Post a Comment