For the sake of journalistic ethics, I’ll list them here: “Winter” was No. The first time I ranked Gilmore Girls, under a combination of recency bias and severe emotional whiplash (look, it was November 2016), I gave the four revival episodes extremely high rankings. Moreover, they take place in an entirely different world: They’re dealing with an adult Rory and a middle-aged Lorelai, and that puts everything off balance. The ’ four episodes are structurally different than their predecessors, each clocking in at 90 minutes long and covering three months at a time, rather than the rapid 45-minute slice-of-life snippets that comprise the bulk of the show. It’s a stunningly consistent show that rarely hits a false note how do you differentiate between two really good episodes of a really good show? Sure, there are outliers, like the almost universally reviled “Vineyard Valentine” and the almost universally beloved “Bracebridge Dinner” but how do you decide if a “There’s the Rub” is better or worse than a “The Nanny and the Professor”? Do you lean more toward the aesthetic beauty of the early seasons, with their gorgeous tonal blend of warmth and melancholy, or toward the psychological complexity of the darker later seasons? What do you do with the anomaly that is season seven, the only season of the show not produced by showrunner Amy Sherman-Palladino and her husband and writing partner, Daniel Palladino?Īnd speaking of anomalies, there’s the problem of the Netflix revival A Year in the Life. Ranking Gilmore Girls was not an easy task. Gilmore Girls is a family drama, and it shines brightest when it’s delving into the fundamental trauma and dysfunction - and the warmth and the joy - of the Gilmore family. It tells us what the show is good at and, by extension, what matters to it. Ranking a TV show episode by episode reveals its bones. On the occasion of the show’s 20th anniversary, I wanted to look back at my original rankings and see what needed tweaking. I first ranked Gilmore Girls episode by episode back in 2016, as the Netflix revival Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life loomed. Now she’s raising her precocious teenage daughter Rory ( Alexis Bledel) in a whimsical small New England town and tentatively working toward reconciliation with her WASPy estranged parents, Emily ( Kelly Bishop) and Richard (the late Edward Herrmann). It’s a low-concept show: Lorelai Gilmore ( Lauren Graham) used to be a daughter of wealth and privilege. Gilmore Girls premiered 20 years ago on the WB, in the fall of 2000, and slowly grew into a sleeper hit. Every episode, even the very worst, has some weird, quirky jewel of a moment that makes the whole thing worth watching - even something as small as Rory casually roasting a marshmallow over her stove burner when she gets home from school, or Taylor showing off his horrible toupee. Every episode of Gilmore Girls has a grace note.
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