11 Acts Of Gilmore Girl That Will Really Make You Wince Now

The Gilmore Girls revival, Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, debuted on Netflix in November 2016, and it was cute and fun and didn't do much to satisfy fans' appetite for clean character resolutions. The revival was written just like the original TV show was—for better and for worse. Better, because Amy Sherman-Palladino and Dan Palladino stuffed the four 90-minute episodes with pop culture references and emotional moments galore—basically, the reasons why we love this show so much. But it wasn't all great: They kept in the same type of culturally insensitive "jokes" that permeated the show during its seven-year run.

Don't know what we're talking about? It's understandable: You probably watched Gilmore Girls as a child or teen, and its problematic elements flew over your head. That, or you didn't even notice them given the racist, homophobic, and fat-shaming TV landscape of the early 2000s. This was the norm, which is exactly why the humor in Friends rings much differently for me now than it did in high school. The same goes for Gilmore Girls. When you look back on the show with the "woke" culture of 2017, it makes the blind spots glaringly apparent. These 10 offenses are particularly cringeworthy.

The way Mrs. Kim, Lane's mother, is portrayed

At the start of Gilmore Girls, the Palladinos reduced Mrs. Kim to an incredibly strict "Tiger Mom" stereotype who speaks with a heavy accent. She evolves slightly throughout the show, but not enough to think the showrunners gave her as much thought as they did to Rory, Lorelai, or even Christopher.

And Michel too, for that matter

Gilmore Girls had a real opportunity to showcase a complex, diverse gay character with Michel. Instead, they keep him in the closet and riddle his dialogue with stereotypes and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy–brand snark. They do finally confirm his sexuality in the revival—a step forward, at least—but that was basically it. We never meet his partner, and his story plays second fiddle to Lorelai's and Rory's champagne problems, as per usual.

When Lorelai shames Sookie for not being in a relationship (???)

PHOTO: WARNER BROS./THE CW

Just one of many times Lorelai was the worst to Sookie.

Emily's interchangeable maids

With few deviations, Emily's maids in Gilmore Girls are women of color, non-English speakers, and—as the show portrays them—interchangeable. Emily's rude treatment (and subsequent firing) of her many maids became a point of "humor" on the show. But there isn't anything funny about a spoiled white person disposing of women working in her home like they aren't human beings.

When Rory fat-shames a ballerina in her Yale Daily News article

Rory confirms that she is a terrible journalist in a season-four episode of Gilmore Girlstitled "Die, Jerk." The "jerk" in question is Rory, who spends the majority of her ballet review for the Yale Daily News fat-shaming one of the dancers instead of, ya know, critiquing the actual performance. (If you recall, she calls this ballerina a "hippo" and points out the "roll of fat around her bra strap." Yikes.) "Jerk" is putting it lightly, to be honest.

The fact that Paris gets rejected from Harvard, but Rory gets in

Just like Blair Waldorf deserved to get into Yale more than the ridiculous Serena van der Woodsen did, the hardworking Paris deserved to get into Harvard way more than Rory. Where is the justice? It especially feels problematic when you remember that Paris doesn't get in after she loses her virginity. Rory, however, is still a virgin—or as Lorelai puts it, "the good kid"—so this somehow makes her more deserving?

When Emily essentially says that fat people shouldn't go to parties

During the season-five episode titled "The Party's Over," Emily is agonizing over how far apart to place the rows of chairs in her living room for a soirée. She wants them far apart enough so that people can "navigate around them comfortably," but not too far. When Emily's workers push the chairs a little wider than her liking, she barks, "Good lord! If someone needs that much room to get around a chair, they shouldn't be at a party. They should be on a treadmill." Yes, Emily literally suggested that plus-size people shouldn't go to parties because they need to be exercising. I'm done.

When Luke says Kirk's bag is "gay"

Because calling inanimate objects "gay" was still a thing in the early 2000s. Hilary Duff put an end to that once and for all with this PSA.

The time Lorelai implies that two people of the same sex kissing would look "funny"

I believe the exact quote was, "We need to leave the country and have extensive plastic surgery. And sex changes! Both of us! So, you know, we can kiss and not look funny.” Ha. Gay people are so weird!

And perhaps the worst of all: this line

PHOTO: WARNER BROS./THE CW

BECAUSE PEOPLE SAID THIS WORD BACK THEN AND DIDN'T BLINK AN EYE. Wow.

The Brain Behind ‘Gilmore Girls’ Explains the Meaning of Those Last Four Words

Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino and her husband, Gilmore co-executive producer Daniel Palladino, are making the rounds to discuss Netflix’s Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, specifically the short conversation Lorelai (Lauren Graham) and Rory (Alexis Bledel) have at the very end.






For those who don’t know, here’s how it ended: “Mom,” Rory says to Lorelai as they sit on the steps of the Stars Hollow gazebo. “Yeah?” Lorelai asks. Rory turns to face her mother. “I’m pregnant,” she says. Then the screen cuts to black. Aaarrggghh!

Naturally, the internet exploded after the revival premiered last Friday (Nov. 29, 2016). Is it Logan’s (Matt Czuchry) baby (apparently Czuchry knows the truth), and how will it affect their relationship? And what about Jess (Milo Ventimiglia), who seems to clearly still love Rory?

Amy told Vulture, “We didn’t really know what that last season was until we got into it and then we asked a lot of questions and we found out where the show ended. The show could have ended in a different place that made those last four words completely irrelevant. So we went into breaking this in a way that we were really looking at it like these three women are at a crossroads. The patriarch has died and what’s the way forward for them?”

She explains that they could have ended the original series with the same four words, but it was more interesting to have Rory be pregnant at the same age Lorelei was when we first met her. “That’s just an interesting kind of dynamic. When we met Lorelai, she was 32 and that’s where she was in her life and now we’re leaving Rory at 32 with the thing on the horizon. It felt kind of cooler to us to do it now than if we had done it when we were still on the WB.”

The Palladinos also spoke with BuzzFeed about the ending and said it wouldn’t out the realm of possibilities for Rory not to keep the baby. “The abortion issue is so weird, you know, because it’s so testy with the world, especially the KKK world that we now live in. But I think that somebody as smart as Rory is going to take a step back and look at all the angles, and then make her decision, because it’s too important a job to make the wrong decision when it comes to kids.”

The bigger question, however, is front and center: Does this mean they are setting things up for another Gilmore Girls go-around? “Nope, not at all,” Sherman-Palladino told Vulture. “We’ve always tried to not wrap things up in a bow. We tried to do that on the series. Because life isn’t like that. You can have a good moment with a parent you are estranged from, and you have a great moment, and then the next time you see them, everything’s back to the way it was before and you guys are throwing knives at each other. Life doesn’t tend to fix things or wrap them up in bows. Because of that, we wanted the ending of this to not have a pat ‘And they all lived happily ever after!'” Sigh.


Oh, and if you want to binge-watch the four 90-minute episodes again (and why wouldn’t you?), then you have to get yourself one of these Binge Candles, created by Netflix.

When you start your marathon of all four episodes, you start burning the Binge Candle. As it burns, it’s perfectly timed to give off a different scent for each episode that correlates to that season. Cool, right?!

We Just Notice This Actress is Acting Two Characters in Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life?

Almost the entire original cast of Gilmore Girls returned for the Netflix revival, A Year in the Life. Even Edward Herrmann, who played Richard Gilmore and passed away in 2014, was a huge presence on the show. But one OG cast member did double duty, reprising her original character and a new one.






Rose Abdoo, who plays Gypsy, Stars Hollow's resident mechanic (/miracle worker, considering how long she's kept Lorelai's car running) took on a second role in the revival. Did you spot her?

Abdoo also played Berta, Emily's unintelligible maid. Emily is notorious for letting maids go after just a few days (or less), but Berta stands the test of time, lasting the entire revival season and even following Emily to her new home in Nantucket.

If you missed this the first time through Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, you are not alone. Abdoo is a chameleon.