Inexplicable Gilmore Girls Revival Review: Winter

Warning: Spoilers follow for the first episode of the Gilmore Girls revival, "Winter."

The biggest thing that the first episode of the Gilmore Girls revival, “Winter,” confirms is that Rory is still an awful person. She’s cheating on her boyfriend with Logan in an overseas bungalow, and by the way, he’s cheating on his heiress with her. Fun times! The end of the regular series featured their break-up, but it’s a bit distressing to imagine that they were both basically emotionally broken for the past eight years.

Also, by the way – Rory’s career is fucking ridiculous. I imagine it’s been dissected to death on the Internet already, but her jet-setting and “work” is a joke. There’s no way she can afford all of that travel without dipping into her trust fund, which I imagine is what’s happening, but the show never mentions it. It’s also shocking that she can’t find work, if she’s been published by the friggin’ New Yorker. Maybe the people interviewing her pick-up on what a prissy mess she is though, you know, the type of high-maintenance writer that turned down her one great job offer out of college.

However, I think it’s more likely that the show simply lacks someone with real-life journalism experience on the writing staff. (I’m available for consulting for the right price! :D ) I say this because the Huntzbergers seem to be doing completely fine. We see Huntzberger Senior in the same swanky restaurant Logan is in, after all, despite the fact that newspapers have gone from “really god damn bad” in 2007 when the show’s run ended to “ohmygod we might never hire anyone again” when the show resumed in 2016. It’s hard to imagine Huntzberger sticking in that same role, although maybe he just got a golden parachute that the show didn’t mention (because it would disrupt the Dream World they’ve created here).

Thankfully, Rory being awful is balanced by the better beef between Lorelai and Emily. The fact that they had a moment earlier in the day at Richard’s funeral only makes the blow-up later sting more. It’s classic “Lorelai in sabotage mode,” and as you can imagine, it takes the whole mini-series to unravel the tangles.

Other thoughts:

- Poor Paris. She basically gets shoehorned into this episode because of Lorelai and Luke’s ridiculous visit to her fertility clinic. It’s not lunacy that Paris is running a place like that, but it just felt all too convenient for purposes of the plot. Once you get past Lorelai, Rory, Emily and Luke, Paris is in the next tier of Important Gilmore Girls Characters, but she just gets a handful of scenes in the revival.

- When Lorelai asked Luke if he wanted a baby, I was trying to do the math in my head about that. Lorelai had Rory at 16 or 17, if I remember correctly. Rory is 22 or 23 at the end of the regular run, so she’s 31 or 32 during the reboot. That would put Lorelai at 46 to 50, tacking a year or two on to both ends of the range. So yeah, that would probably not be an especially fun pregnancy.

- Hep Alien reunites!  Well, kind of. No cameo from Dave; maybe Seth Cohen was busy shooting an O.C. revival. But it was great to see Gil. And hey, Zach and Lane, still the best and highest-functioning couple on Gilmore Girls! It was great to see them legitimately happy, since I was bracing myself for 20 minutes of “ohmygod their marriage is actually in deep trouble,” because it seems like nothing good can happen on this show and Zach was noticeably more grey / silver.

- Luke and Lorelai are clearly in an uncomfortable stasis / holding pattern, but it’s also clear that that’s going to be the meat of the future episodes, along with Rory being horrible and the Emily-Lorelai relationship.

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