Amy Sherman-Palladino’s mother-and-daughter comedy talks faster than almost anything else on television and means every word. The first three seasons are as good as network comedy-drama gets; the last two are tired, and most people watch them anyway.
Amy Sherman-Palladino’s idea is simple. Lorelai Gilmore had a baby at sixteen and raised the girl alone in a small Connecticut town, where she now runs an inn. Sixteen years on, mother and daughter are closer to each other than either is to anyone else, and the programme is about what that costs. The first three of its seven seasons are as good as network comedy-drama gets. The last two are not, and we will come to them.
The talk is what people remember. Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino write dialogue that runs at nearly twice the pace of anything around it, stuffed with references to films, bands and old television that nobody stops to explain, and a 44-minute episode carries what a rival would spread across an hour. Jane Espenson, Jenji Kohan and Bill Prady passed through the writers’ room. More than forty directors, Lesli Linka Glatter, Jamie Babbit and Nicole Holofcener among them, mostly keep out of the way: long takes, actors walking the corridors of the inn or across the town square.
Lauren Graham is the engine. She plays Lorelai as a woman who has spent sixteen years talking her way out of trouble; she can land a joke, take a mouthful of coffee and let you see the worry underneath in one movement. Alexis Bledel has the quieter part. Rory is bookish, polite and slightly too good, and Bledel’s stillness stops her being a prig. The two of them eating takeaway on the sofa is the programme’s basic unit, and it never wears out.
The Friday dinners are where it turns serious. When Lorelai goes to her parents for Rory’s school fees, Emily (Kelly Bishop) agrees on condition that both of them come to dinner every Friday, and so the programme gets its second household, a large dark house where nobody says what they mean. Bishop plays Emily as a woman who has been proved right about everything and made unhappy by it, and there is a moment at that first dinner, when she understands that her daughter would rather do anything than ask her for help, where we stopped laughing and did not start again for some time. It was Bishop’s face that did it, and the script’s decision to give her nothing to say. Edward Herrmann’s Richard sits behind his newspaper and turns out to be the one person in the house Rory can talk to.
The town is full of people funnier than the plots they are given. Melissa McCarthy’s Sookie St. James, the inn’s chef, is clumsy and gifted and the one friend Lorelai does not perform for. Keiko Agena’s Lane Kim hides records under the floorboards from a mother who disapproves of them, and it is a better story than most of Rory’s. Yanic Truesdale’s Michel Gerard is handed one sneer and asked to repeat it for years. Liza Weil’s Paris Geller starts as a cartoon and becomes the most interesting person in it. Scott Patterson’s Luke Danes owns the diner, pours the coffee, disapproves of the coffee, and is so plainly the right man for Lorelai that the programme has to work hard to keep them apart.
That is the first weakness. The romances go round in circles. Rory is passed between Jared Padalecki’s Dean Forester, Milo Ventimiglia’s Jess Mariano and Matt Czuchry’s Logan Huntzberger, and the argument is much the same each time. The second weakness is the end. The final season was made without Sherman-Palladino; it sounds like her and does not think like her. Rory becomes harder to like as she grows up, which may be honest but is not much fun. We were bored in stretches of the sixth season, and then cross about being bored by people we had come to love.
Against the small-town American television it belongs to, from Northern Exposure onwards, this is the one that trusted its audience to keep up. Sherman-Palladino went on to make The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel at the same speed with more money, and it is not better. Start at the beginning, watch in autumn, and when you feel the fifth season begin to loosen, remember you were warned and carry on. Almost everyone does.
