 Alexis Bledel, Lauren Graham play teen daughter and single mom |
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A warm-hearted adult dramedy may upgrade Thursday nights
By
RON MILLER
of TheColumnists.com
It didn't take me long to know I was going to love The WB's "Gilmore
Girls," a program designed especially to appeal to family
audiences. Once I heard it was a "family values" show,
I was absolutely certain that would be the kiss of death. In
my imagination, I pictured somebody like Tipper Gore blessing
the show with a fairy magic wand and Congress giving it a citation.
Thank Heavens it turns out to be way too smart a show for any of that. And it's way too hip for the kind of family audience that soaks up pap like "Touched by An Angel" every week. In fact, I can picture Dan Quayle losing lots of sleep over the family values issues raised in "Gilmore Girls." Nor can I picture Tipper waving any fairy wands over it, unless they're the kind made in San Francisco's Castro district by 21st century fairies.
What I'm trying to get out in my fumbling fashion is that "Gilmore Girls" may be a decent-minded show, but it's not dopey and dippy, two qualities that often can be found in programs designed especially for the family audience. If the first episode is any indication, it's going to be a comedic drama with a bittersweet quality rarely found in commercial network television.
Here's the basic situation: Single mom Lorelai Gilmore (Lauren Graham) has raised her 16-year-old daughter, Rory (Alexis Bledel), to be a level-headed young woman who won't make the same mistakes her mom made. Chief among them: Getting pregnant by a boy she really didn't love, which caused her to sacrifice her college education and all that was expected of her in life.
Now, in the hands of some TV writers and producers, this would come out as angst-heavy drama. The Mom, no doubt, would subconsciously blame the daughter for wrecking her life and poison her mind with lots of heavy-duty lecturing. But these particular writers and producers, chiefly Amy Sherman-Palladino from "Roseanne," were observant enough to recognize America is filled with single moms who wound up in similar situations and didn't go down in flames over it.
In this story, Lorelai learned from her teenage mistakes and has re-directed her life to make the best of things for both herself and her daughter. First, she freely admits her own culpability for the pregnancy ("You don't get knocked up at 16 being indifferent to guys," she tells her daughter.) Second, she stresses the need to take responsibility for your own life and work hard for what you get.
It has worked for Lorelai, who supported her baby by taking a job as a hotel maid. Over the past 16 years, she has worked her way up to the job of manager at a very trendy hotel called, not coincidentally, the Independence Inn. Daughter Rory also has turned out to be a bright and resourceful girl -- and a good enough student to be accepted into Chilton, one of the most sought after prep schools in nearby Hartford.
Lorelai, who's 32, also has kept herself looking awfully good, which means you might sometimes even mistake mother and daughter for sisters in the right light. They have a very close relationship that often seems much more like that of sisters or best pals than mother-daughter, hence the "Gilmore Girls" title. Their relationship is so easy, in fact, that when cranky daughter is barking at cranky mom one evening, Lorelai rhetorically observes, "I had dibs on being the bitch tonight!" Her sense of humor almost always relieves any tension between the two of them.
If they're such good pals and they're doing so well, you might wonder where's the conflict? Well, they're not doing THAT well. For one thing, Chilton wants a $5,000 deposit from Lorelai to admit her daughter -- and they might as well have asked for $1 million. Worse yet, they want it yesterday.
"She's supposed to start Monday and that doesn't give me much time to do a bank job," Lorelai remarks at one point.
That leads to their other primary source of conflict: Lorelai's parents, who have been disapproving of her rather loudly ever since she turned up pregnant and threatened to tarnish the family reputation bigtime. Her mom (Kelly Bishop) can't get over the fact her beloved daughter ended up as a hotel maid instead of going to college. And since her father is played by Edward Herrmann, who can do stuffy upper-crust gentlemen like nobody else in Hollywood, he obviously hasn't seen any other angles on her for the last 16 years except the ones visible when looking down one's nose.
Naturally, Lorelai has only one shot at getting the money to pay for Chilton: Borrow it from her folks. Knowing what's up Lorelai's sleeve, her parents invite her and Rory to dinner, something Lorelai normally avoids because those dinners usually end up with her getting roasted by the folks. Rory also wants to avoid the dinner for a host of reasons, but her mom begs her to be on her best behavior at dinner, "then you can pull a Menendez on the way home."
This all works very well because the writers have given Lorelai some fabulously funny lines and Lauren Graham has turned her into a richly-textured, witty, vulnerable and utterly loveable character. You are going to flip for Graham, by the way. She is one of the best treats of the new TV season: A lovely and loveable young woman who's impossible to resist.
Best of all, though, is the fact that "Gilmore Girls" creates a completely believeable mother-daughter relationship that's very contemporary. Though the 1999 feature film "Anywhere but Here" with Susan Sarandon and Natalie Portman came close to this relationship, Sarandon's mother character was more outlandish. Lorelai, like most real-life single moms, takes her responsibility very seriously, even if she pops a lot of very amusing one-liners while doing it.
In the first episode, nearly all Lorelai's witticisms seem to go over the heads of the people who surround her. I may be wrong, but I think that's the writers' subtle way of telling us she's much smarter than the level of society where she's taken root, which may be the most severe punishment she has to endure for her mistakes of youth.
I love the idea that Lorelai is a good mom who wants her daughter to turn out right, but doesn't mope around about the situation her own mistakes created. And we all ought to appreciate the fact that Rory is truly a normal, decent girl and not some TV sitcom moppet, bristling with her own adult one-liners. I know people like this mom and daughter, so for once TV is getting it right.
Where "Gilmore Girls" goes from here is anybody's guess. We meet an ensemble of characters who may become more important: The French desk clerk, the clumsy kitchen chef, etc. But they're much more from the sitcom world than the principal characters. If we're lucky, they'll stay in the background most of the time.
Being scheduled opposite NBC's "Friends" isn't the biggest break The WB could give this one-hour show, but I won't have any trouble deciding between those two choices. How it will do as the lead-in to "Charmed," the network's returning witchcraft drama, is debatable, but I'm sort of glad the network didn't do the obvious and put it after "7th Heaven" on Monday nights, creating an all-family night.
Though CBS' new "That's Life" is also a "family show" and is a reasonably intelligent example of one, I like "Gilmore Girls" a lot better. It tells me the little WB network is still making good things happen in prime time, which is more than you can say about a few of the much bigger networks.
© 2000 by Ron Miller. The photo from
"Gilmore Girls" is © 2000 by The WB.
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