Where Amy Sherman-Palladino Leads, We Will Follow: Gilmore Girls at 25
(Photo: The WB)
Picture this: it’s October 5, 2000. You turn on your television, cozy up on the couch, and tune into The WB Network for your latest fix of all things teen drama. A new show with an alliterative title might catch your eye… and within minutes, you are transfixed by two fast-talking, sidewalk-strutting, coffee-guzzling, tall, dark-haired women with startlingly blue eyes. And hence, with There She Goes by the La’s filling your living room and the introduction of the Gilmore Girls, your life is never the same.
For those somehow unfamiliar, Gilmore Girls follows 32-year-old Lorelai Gilmore (Lauren Graham), a teen mom who left home and moved to a small town in Connecticut to raise her quietly precocious daughter, Rory (Alexis Bledel). The show begins right before Rory’s sixteenth birthday, when Lorelai is forced to ask her estranged parents (the formidable Kelly Bishop and Richard Hermann) for financial help to send Rory to a prestigious private school.
October 5, 2025, marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the premiere of Gilmore Girls’ first episode. At last month’s 77th Primetime Emmy Awards show, Graham and Bledel reunited onstage to present the award for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series. Backlit by the soft lighting emanating from a set recreation of Lorelai’s farmhouse-style white wraparound porch, the pair acknowledged the anniversary with their characters’ quintessential quips.
The internet went wild seeing the titular Gilmore Girls together again, even in an unofficial capacity. The power of the Palladinos’ universe prevails, grown even stronger in the years since the series’ first go-round, thanks to social media. By no means a sleeper hit during its original run¾each episode garnered an average live viewership of five million¾Gilmore Girls still only won one Emmy across an impressive catalogue of 153 episodes… for makeup, of all things. This feels downright insulting and borderline sacrilegious, especially for a show that was known for regularly featuring scenes so chock-full of rapid, dynamic dialogue that the scripts were often double the normal length.
I first watched Gilmore Girls over ten years ago, deep in the trenches of early middle school angst, per the recommendation of my English teacher. He was a man who looked a lot like Edgar Allen Poe and did not fit the bill of the “typical” Gilmore Girls fan, offering proof that this show truly is for everyone. The following week happened to be Thanksgiving break (which is, dare I say, the perfect time to be introduced to Stars Hollow, CT). Thus, every spare moment I could find that was not taken up by family obligations or outdoor activities was spent on the air mattress in the living room, lying prone on my stomach, soaking up every last drop.
I have rewatched it almost every single year since. It somehow does not get old. There are definitely specific storylines I tend to skip (cough a certain affair cough), but like a fine wine, most of it only gets better as you age. With each year I acquire new knowledge and sink further into the pop culture zeitgeist, the more of the subtly sharp references that pop out of the Gilmore girls’ mouths at one hundred miles a minute I’m able to laugh at, because now I understand them.
The staying power of this series is ridiculous. It’s eponymously a “girl” show, so the obvious audience may seem to be young women, but it truly appeals to all. It was especially unique for its time — and remains so now —because of its focus on both an adult and a teen in equal measure. This helps give the series its timeless feel, because you can really watch it and/or revisit it at any stage in your life. My mom watched it for the first time two years ago, after years of my begging. She fell in love with it just as much as I have, because she was able to relate to Lorelai’s struggles, where I have always connected more with Rory.
While Gilmore Girls often got a lot of attention for its relationships, the friendships at its center were often just as romantic. People in Stars Hollow lift each other up; they network, they bicker, they know each other intimately in a way that modern-day dating apps and social media seem to erode incrementally with each new update. Everyone craves social connection, regardless of your status as an introvert, an extrovert, or otherwise. Yet I think this is especially true for those of us who were barely toddlers when Gilmore Girls was on air, who did not get the privilege of growing up in a “slower” world.
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