November 25 saw the revival of popular show Gilmore Girls, with four feature-length episodes streaming exclusively to Netflix.
Gilmore Girls ran for seven seasons from 2000 – 2007 and starred Lauren Graham as Lorelai Gilmore and Alexis Bledel as her daughter Rory Gilmore. The four-part Netflix revival picked up eight years on from the original series.
The revival has been met with mixed reactions, with some viewers taking to social media to express how Lorelai, Rory, and other characters were “kind of awful sometimes and a little bit selfish.”
As Entertainment Weekly points out, Lauren Graham has responded to the backlash at a SAG-AFTRA panel discussion, comparing the revival to Donald Trump. Speaking of Rory’s boyfriend Paul whom the characters keep forgetting, Graham replied, “We don’t pay attention to anything. We don’t know. None of us are on the internet, almost at all.”
“So I know what you mean, but the show has a sense of humour, and that’s its sense of humour. And I think maybe it feels a little different; Rory’s not in high school anymore, so yes, as grown women constantly forgetting… I just thought it was a funny runner,” she continued.
“But the whole show has a kind of heightened theatrical quality. I mean, just like Donald Trump, don’t take it literally.”
In her book, Talking As Fast As I Can: From Gilmore Girls to Gilmore Girls, Graham offers her thoughts on the original seasons as well as reflections on her career.
While Graham writes that the show gave her “an adrenaline-fueled dialogue high” during Season 1, she admits to struggling with the role by the final seasons.
Speaking about the book to USA Today, she compared filming the seventh season without creator Amy Sherman-Palladino to “when David Lee Roth was replaced as the lead singer of Van Halen.”
However, Graham added that she has found the reboot, which was released on Netflix last week, “incredibly satisfying”.