And if was the last episode ever? Wtf

What do we think about smoking while half submerged in a manhole? It’s a bad idea right? Especially if you work for Con-Ed and there’s the truck sitting right next to you and a bunch of wires are running from it down into the hole. Definitively, wires and manholes and cigarettes are a bad combo, but smoking while half submerged in a manhole full of wires is exactly what one mustachioed Con-Ed dude was doing this morning.
This made me think about Gilmore Girls (after I’d gone through the whole safety spaz I just elaborated in the previous paragraph) because a guy smoking in a manhole is exactly the kind of thing that might appear on that show, for absolutely no good reason. You can just imagine Lorelei walking by such a scene while on her phone and breaking into some fast-jive patter about common sense, exploding streets, taking cigarette breaks in appropriate locations and getting totally frothed up about this Man lighting a Fire around Electrical equipment, and then making some reference to either Michael Jackson or James Hetfield getting burned up by onstage fireworks that only kind of makes sense, but she says so fast you laugh anyway. And it’s would all be so totally irrelevant and totally charming and totally annoying because she so hasn’t talked to Luke yet in this episode and she probably won’t and, frankly, you don’t watch Gilmore Girls only to hear Lorelei’s rants, so could the Palladinos throw you a freaking bone already?
Or maybe I’d already been thinking about Gilmore Girls this morning because I watched the season finale the other night and it focused on exactly such an irrelevant happening, and for a really, really long time. It was the last episode with the show’s creator Amy Sherman-Palladino, who didn’t resign her contract. The show will air next year without her (if it gets picked up) and that… should be interesting. It seems a given that next year’s show runners will take an LBJ approach to the Palladino agenda, but that should be an exceedingly difficult thing to do. Gilmore Girls has been great (and obvs, I watch it religiously. Though that in and of itself certainly doesn’t mean it’s high quality), but under Palladino’s six seasons of direction it has also been incredibly frustrating and flat-out weird, not in an X-Files way, but in a, “seriously, you’ve decided to spend 20 minutes on this utterly irrelevant, usually annoying, side plot?” way.
A good third of the finale was taken up by my least favorite townie, Taylor, the persnickety top politico of Star’s Hollow (the Gilmores' home town), a minor character who appears every few weeks and then monopolizes excruciating amounts of screen time. Basically, after Stars Hollow’s resident “troubadour” was plucked off the street to open for Neil Young (the troubadour is this guy who sings songs between scenes while standing on the street corner) dozens of musicians (including Sonic Youth, Yo La Tengo and 24’s Mary Lynn Rajskub) descended on the town, hoping for their big break. This segment consisted of performances by said acts, stitched together by outbursts from Taylor to the effect that they all needed to leave, because it was bad for business and sleeping. Apologies to Kim Gordon and all, but the fast forward button got a good work out this episode.
The show’s consistent dedication to the unnecessary is part of the reason people love it with the passion that they do-- it’s unique and not driven by schlocky soap opera hijinks, but the bizarre antics of the Gilmores’ neighbors and friends. But ultimately the town weirdos are not why we tune in week after week. We watch for Lorelei and Rory. In a season finale, when we’re about to go cold turkey on the girls for the next four months, I know I’d much rather see them then the cloying antics of Taylor and the troubadours, no matter how famous or cool they really are.
Palladino is like one of those parents who confiscates all of your Halloween candy and then doles out three pieces, night by night. But one of those is always a box of raisins. You’re never going to get all the candy you want--you’re going to have just enough to keep you from getting mad and just enough to remind you that you like candy—-and you’re always going to get a piece that, like, you’ll eat, but not ecstatically. Gilmore viewers are never going to get as much conversation between Lorelei and her boyfriend, Luke, or Lorelei and her mother as they want. They’ll get just enough to hope for more and just enough to remember that they’re invested in these relationships. And for the rest of the time they’ll have to watch raisins.
Of course, the benefit of this piece-by-piece approach is that when you get a good bit, it’s all the more precious. When Palladino finally gets around to tackling the major story lines, Gilmore gives you the most gratification per second of any show on the air. The finale contained a brief, but intense fight between Luke and Lorelei, the culmination of months of tension. It wasn’t long, it wasn’t thorough, but it was great—after all the months of inaction, of nothing happening, this three -minute fight carried the emotional weight of an entire episode. I’ll watch next September to see what happened to them, even though I’m really aggravated that almost every other minute of the show was dedicated to less pressing plot points.
Doling out the exact right amount of information to keep viewers watching, despite mounting frustration, is a complex balancing act. It’s possible that all the writers working on the next season of the show, who’ve been working on it for years, will be able to achieve this balance without Palladino. Some shows can survive losing their major creative voice-- The West Wing managed to surmount Aaron Sorkin’s departure (though it took a few years for West Wing to get good again and The Gilmore Girls, probably entering its last season, may not have that kind of time.)
I imagine the writers will probably be able to keep up Palladino’s fast paced, pop culture laced dialogue, though perhaps the references will be a little less random, but what they’ll do about the townies is another matter. Palladino has demonstrated a dedication to those characters that, basically, keeps her show from being as entertaining as it could be. This makes her different than Sorkin-- West Wing writers literally just had to learn how to crib from his playbook, they didn't have to evaluate whether or not everything on the show had been working under his direction, because it had been. There are a lot of things that don’t work about Gilmore and that seem to be there only by force of Palladino’s will. Avoiding Lorelei and Rory for a third of your finale is a ballsy thing to do, but on paper it doesn’t seem like something your audience would want. In fact, it’s not something that your audience wants. But it was there anyway, because, well, Palladino really wanted to meet Thurston Moore. Or, in past episodes, has really wanted to meet Norman Mailer. And, in a less fan girl way, seems to truly believe that the antics of the townies are integral to the show. This isn't really debateable, but the amount of time that must be dedicated to these antics is. Palladino has allotted tons of time to these characters, whether the writers next year will too remains to be seen. Without her around maybe those side characters will score far less screen time. If that’s the case Gilmore Girls will become a more typical television show. It will be less frustrating for sure, but also less interesting--lacking the idiosyncratic, at times insufferable tics that have made it so unique. Beyond all the fast-talking, those quirky weirdos and unnecessary asides are what have made Gilmore Girls the Gilmore Girls.