S I G H T S 

Small Town Girls

The Gilmore Girls live a charmed - but unrealistic - life in idyllic Connecticut

by Joe Newman

Since I’m a bit of a newcomer to The Gilmore Girls phenomenon, I took advantage of last week’s pre-sweeps reruns and caught what was actually the second episode, titled "The Lorelais’ First Day at Chilton," which originally aired in October. The series is fast becoming the frog’s biggest draw, and it’s the first developed by the Family Friendly Programming Forum’s Script Development Fund, something The WB describes as "an initiative between some of the nation’s top advertisers and The WB ” intended to offer a greater array of compelling family programming on network television." A recent nomination as one of the best new shows of 2000 by TV Guide added critical merit to its family appeal.

So you see, given the lack of quality programs for families, all this makes it very difficult for me to say the show, like its characters, has some very serious issues.

Here’s a bit of background. Lorelai Gilmore (Lauren Graham) is the single mom of Lorelai Gilmore (Alexis Bledel), named by the elder Lorelai after herself but nicknamed Rory to avoid obvious problems. At 16, Rory is the same age Lorelai was when she got pregnant, setting up the constant comparisons between the two as they deal with issues of maturity and responsibility. Lorelai is beset with little challenges, ranging from managing a quaint Connecticut inn to rearing her daughter, all the while imploring her astonishingly wealthy mother not to shower Rory with gifts.

Meanwhile, Rory is faced with the normal bevy of issues confronting the common 16-year-old girl. The show is set in the idyllic little town of Stars Hollow, but various background shots, including one of the famous Gelston House Restaurant, make a case for East Haddam, Conn., which, coincidentally, happens to be an idyllic little town.

It’s clear Lorelai believes Rory’s chances of making the Ivy League (Rory’s dream school is Harvard) would be better served if she attended private school. Rory, who was at the head of her class in the local public school, has been accepted to Chilton Academy, a prestigious prep school somewhere nearby. This forces Lorelai to ask her mother to pay for the tuition. She agrees, in exchange for Lorelai and Rory attending insufferable family dinners held every Friday night.

The show wastes no time in establishing the Lorelai/Rory role-reversal that’s become its hallmark. On Rory’s first day of school, it’s Lorelai who wakes up late. When Rory is dressed smartly in her school uniform, Lorelai can’t find anything clean to wear save for a tie-dye shirt and cut-off shorts. And so on. But while these little situations come and go, the bubble-world of Stars Hollow is permanent, which leaves me thinking The Gilmore Girls is one long stereotype masquerading as innovation.

For starters, there’s the “Independence Inn” Lorelai manages. What would be a more perfect name for a traditional New England B&B nestled in the Connecticut River Valley and run by a single mom? If there’s a more contrived moniker, the writers couldn’t think of it. And at Chilton, naturally, the headmaster is stern, the secretary wears her hair in a bun, the girls are vicious, and the boys all bear a spooky resemblance to Prince William.

This quaint town myth is something I take very seriously. I grew up in another charming hamlet, but I attended public schools and didn’t go to Harvard, or even Yale. I know from experience that these small, attractive communities are where income disparity plays out on a very personal level, unsheltered from the relative anonymity of large cities. When one of the local fat cats rolls down the street in a new Jaguar, Chuck the hardware guy knows it. When the parents of the steep percentage of children in my hometown who attend private school voted against increasing the public school budget, I knew it.

The representation of Stars Hollow as a nurturing haven where your neighbor calls to make sure that yes, you did call the cable man who is snooping around your backyard is, well, a bit off the mark. Put it this way: In stark contrast to Lorelai’s best friend, Sookie St. James, the jolly overweight chef, one cook at a nearby inn was known as Pot Smokin’ Andy. I know this because my brother, another public school product, once worked there as a bus boy while on break from Cornell.

Many other critics, from Salon’s Joyce Millman to Entertainment Weekly’s Ken Tucker, applaud the show’s witty humor and light touch. This is television after all. The scenery is great, the dialogue is well written, and it provides a family-safe fantasy world that parents and children can enjoy together, without fear of racy bedroom scenes or violence. Lorelai and Rory conspire to make it all look easy. Single mom and teenager daughter trying to do the right thing, simultaneously nurturing their inner child and adult. All this without the presence of one dominant authority. Millman put it best when she called it "a parent-free zone for parents." Part of that freedom is freedom from judgment, and the show makes a strong effort to show that having Rory was the best thing that ever happened to Lorelai.

While this unapologetic attitude towards single motherhood is fundamentally a good thing, it gets lost in the show’s airbrushing. Lorelai and Rory escape most of life’s real challenges in steep contrast to other single-parent representations on other programs.

Take another single-mom show set in Connecticut, CBS’s equally acclaimed drama, Judging Amy. Amy Gray (Amy Brenneman) is a former New York City attorney who returns to Hartford to become a judge of juvenile court. Every day she faces the very real issues that confront children, from sexual harassment to abusive families to drugs, and she has to rule on the choices the children in her court made when faced with those circumstances.

These challenges hit very close to home, because Amy is also a single mom, which forces her to ask, "What if the child before me were mine?" The title, Judging Amy, is perfect. Rather than encouraging the viewer to laugh off irresponsibility, the viewer is invited to ask, is she doing the right thing?

We rarely have that opportunity with The Gilmore Girls, largely because very few single moms have the enviable issues of inn management and private schools to deal with. That Lorelai is intent on raising Rory without further monetary assistance from her mother is actually rather inconsequential; a safety net will always be there. How many single moms have security like that? While there is merit in the loving relationship shared by the two, that value is mitigated by alienating the Gilmore girls from the majority of single-parent families. To be fair, the show is new and could improve. But Lorelai and Rory would have to face some world-shattering crisis to convince me The Biltmore Girls might not be a more appropriate title.

Joe Newman is a writer who lives in Connecticut. He previously wrote about The Simpsons and The West Wing.

Related Sites
Visit The Gilmore Girls site, or Judging Amy.
Amy Benfer of Salon writes about finding parallels to her own life as a single mother at age 16, and about Lorelai Gilmore’s habit of breaking social codes. "She has the taste and pedigree of someone who was born knowing what to do with the silver spoon in her mouth and the independence of someone who has pulled herself up by her bootstraps," writes Benfer.