GGAYITL was a BIG mistake - we don't need another revival

Reviving Gilmore Girls is the worst thing that could happen to Netflix. A Year in the Life was disgusting – nobody liked it – and adding to it would only make things WORSE!!!!!

First of all, allow me to contradict the embarrassment that was Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life. Absolutely EVERYTHING about it was wrong. Let us discuss Graham and Bledel. They DO NOT have it anymore. Lauren Graham can speak nowhere near as quickly as she could fifteen years ago. And as for Alexis Bledel, I don’t what she thought she was doing or where she thought she was, but she was nothing like the old Rory we have learnt to love (reluctantly for many, might I add). However, we must not entirely blame Alexis for this, as it was mostly down to the writers, Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino, that we all hated Rory so much more in this miniseries. The Rory Gilmore we knew and loved, who had big dreams and a big heart, suddenly flicks between houses and boyfriends as she desperately grabs any job interview she can get and, for some reason, sleeps with wookies at the same time. In four episodes, we see Rory forgetting about her official boyfriend, Paul, cheating with her now-engaged ex-boyfriend in London, sleeping with a random guy she just met and flirting a little bit with her other ex-boyfriend, Jess. Whatever happened to the sweet, innocent Rory, feeling guilty for having a little crush on her new professor? Oh, and let’s not forget to mention that she has also lost the fast-speaking Gilmore gift.

Somehow, all the other characters were fine. Obviously, they looked older, but other than that, I didn’t feel that they had lost a thing (except for Miss Patty actor, Liz Torres, who had lost about forty pounds). It was just our main girls who really ruined it for us. We still had our quirky Kirk, our lumberjack-looking Luke, even our tiresome Taylor, but the gregarious Gilmores just weren’t fully there.

Of course, one possible explanations is that one of our favourite characters and actors, Richard Gilmore/Ed Hermann, was unfortunately missing from the cast of this revival. Rest in peace, Edward Hermann, you are and will continue to be dearly missed.

Before AYITL came out, there was a big hype around ‘the last four words’. Shortly before October 2016, when the series was released, a video message from Lauren Graham and Alexis Bledel was posted on social media by Gilmore Girls asking people not to spoil the last four words in case whoever they’re talking to hasn’t seen it yet (Bledel related it to spoiling Game of Thrones). Spoken at the very end of the miniseries, these last four words were how Amy Sherman-Palladino wanted to end the original seven series, however due to a contact dispute, they left the show after Season 6 and David S. Rosenthal ran the seventh season. The last four words, though, did not go down as well as the Palladinos must have hoped. The words are, Rory: “Mom?”, Lorelai: “Yeah?”, Rory: “I’m pregnant”. Whilst this is a nice way to give the show a full circle, the intriguing ending was futile considering the unlikeliness that there would be AYITL Season 2 or another revival.

Just a couple more things: Lorelai and Luke get engaged in the final episode of AYITL, and they plan the wedding and everything, giving the readers the expectation to see a brilliant big wedding with the whole town, ending the miniseries similarly to the original series, but Lorelai and Luke decide to elope THE NIGHT BEFORE THE WEDDING!!! Not even twenty-four hours before they would be married, they decided that they couldn’t actually wait that long and had a small wedding in the town square with only Rory, Lane and Michel, and somehow all of Miss Patty’s dancers who magically knew that Lorelai and Luke were eloping and “needed” their flash mob at that moment (they really didn’t need it though – they could have waited for the proper wedding).

As much as we would all love to see our beloved characters again, AYITL has proved that this is simply not possibly. Lorelai and Rory died when the original series did, and nothing can change that. The Palladinos can never please every Gilmore Girls fan, and they shouldn’t try. As annoying as those last four words are, and us fun as it would be to see Rory as a mommy to a tiny little baby, it would not be what you are hoping for or expecting, and it would DEFINITELY not have that special Gilmore Girls-y feeling. This show is better left UNTOUCHED, from here on out.

Ivy Stephens