The Gilmore Girls Guide to Family Trauma

it's not just escapism

Yes, I’m extremely late to the party. I’ve been watching Gilmore Girls for the first time. The series originally aired in the early 2000s, and has become a cult classic and a staple watch for many. It certainly encapsulates the small-town New England charm that I’m a big fan of, it’s full of witty dialogue, and the characters are loveable and delightfully quirky. As a big fan of Northern Exposure, which aired a decade earlier, I find this show to be strikingly similar, although it’s generally aimed at a younger and more female audience. But regardless of gender, the show is highly enjoyable and well worth your time.

For the uninitiated, here’s a quick run-down of the premise.

Lorelai Gilmore and her daughter Rory live in the quaint little town of Stars Hollow, Connecticut. Rory has just been accepted into the prestigious Chilton Preparatory School, in nearby Hartford. She’s a precocious bookworm and has lofty ambitions to go to Harvard and become a journalist. But there’s one problem: Lorelai can’t afford the tuition. She’s a single mother, and has worked her way up at the local inn to become the manager there, but Chilton is one of the most illustrious private schools in the country, and the prices are steep. Reluctantly, and only because she has no other options, Lorelai goes to her rich parents to ask for their help.

Lorelai’s relationship with her parents Richard and Emily has always been rocky, but when she became pregnant with Rory at age 16, and the resulting scandal in their hoity-toity high-society milieu strained their relationship even more, she eventually ran away to raise Rory on her own terms. This was a huge blow to her parents, and they have never forgiven each other since. Emily and Richard feel that Lorelai is keeping their granddaughter from them — which she is — and Lorelai wants nothing to do with their meddling and criticising. 

Miraculously, they agree to fund Rory’s education, but on one condition. Emily, a master manipulator, demands that in return, she and Rory must come to dinner at their house every Friday night. Lorelai is appalled by the notion, but accepts so that Rory can attend Chilton.

It’s a genius premise, one of the best I’ve ever come across. Lorelai is essentially forced by circumstance to allow her parents back into her life again and attempt to get along with them. And it doesn’t go swimmingly at first. Old hurts resurface, arguments break out, many a dinner gets ruined. But in order to uphold her agreement she must keep seeing them again, and over time, their relationship starts to improve.

Along the way we meet the other inhabitants of Stars Hollow, including the surly diner owner Luke, the eccentric neighbours Babette and Morey, and the cougarish dance teacher Ms. Patty. We also meet Lorelai’s best friend and chef at the inn Sookie, and the perpetually miserable receptionist Michel. Against this backdrop, real life goes on as normal — Rory has her first boyfriends and prepares to go to college, Lorelai and Sookie plan to open their own inn, Luke’s troublemaking nephew comes to live with him — but in my mind, the real plot of the show is the family drama.

Gilmore Girls handles this troubled family dynamic extremely well. The way patterns of abuse are passed down and cycles of trauma are perpetuated is incredibly true to life. But more than that, each character is fully fleshed-out, and we see the humanity in each of them. It would be easy to portray Lorelai’s parents as completely awful people who have nothing redemptive about them whatsoever, but instead we see their complexities, get to understand the motivations behind their actions, and grow to care for them as much as any other character in the show. Make no mistake, their behaviour is frequently troubling — but all of the characters are flawed, and Lorelai is no angel herself. Everyone has a shadow side, and there are no goodies or baddies in this show.

Watching the show almost feels like a guide for dealing with narcissistic, manipulative behaviour. It’s portrayed realistically, in that there’s no easy, quick solution to make everything perfect — there are some issues in Lorelai’s relationship with Rory as well — and it does follow the classic ‘two steps forward, one step back’ formula, which is how such things tend to go in real life. But ultimately, Lorelai comes to understand her parents better, particularly her mother, and develops better methods of dealing with their outbursts while still maintaining healthy boundaries. They even grow to like each other more, and start to move on from the pain of the past — none of which would have happened if Lorelai hadn’t been forced into it. Sometimes life intervenes when it needs to.

Gilmore Girls is really good about many things, this being just one of them. It’s notable for being a show which focuses on the lives of women and girls, and tackles subjects like sex and teenage pregnancy with remarkable sensitivity. But, it has to be said, the show is not so good when it comes to gay people. There are frequent homophobic remarks which seem to come out of left field and just feel completely unnecessary. The show is also entirely absent of gay characters, though quite a few of them are heavily gay-coded. And they’re arguably the most unpleasant and annoying characters, as funny as they are to watch, and they exist mainly as comic relief rather than being complex characters like Lorelai and Emily. Apparently Sookie was originally meant to be gay, but the network wouldn’t allow it — okay, fine — however that doesn’t change what remains in the show itself.

It’s a shame, because Gilmore Girls is such a good show otherwise, that it alienates such a huge sector of its audience in this way. And from the sounds of things, the 2016 reboot wasn’t much better, despite how much things have come on since the early aughts in this area. The show doesn’t provide any actual gay representation, yet has no problem relying on stereotypes and cheap shots.

But back to the point at hand. There seems to be two ways of thinking about TV and why you watch it. For many, it’s escapism. They watch things to take them away from life and its stresses, and they don’t want to think about serious life stuff while watching TV. And Gilmore Girls has plenty of that — it’s a cosy, comforting bundle-up-in-blankets kind of show, especially if you have a fantasy of living in a winsome idyll in New England. But then there’s the other reason, which is watching shows because they deal with important, serious life stuff — and Gilmore Girls has plenty of that too, if you don’t ignore it. Like any good story, it needs conflict to drive the plot forward, and the writers choose topics that give great insight into the characters. Conflict drives the Gilmores to unearth their pain and face it, and they mature as people as a result.

The way the show handles family dysfunction encourages you as the viewer to reflect on your own family, and wonder about how you could approach issues you may be having in a new way. And in that way, it does what all great art does: it functions as a mirror of us, and teaches us about ourselves. Nothing against escapism, but sometimes you need to confront something, and escapism won’t help you with that. The best shows, you might say, have both – and Gilmore Girls is certainly one of them.

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