If you thought millennials were too young for nostalgia, you would be wrong.
First the millennials (of which I am one) revived The X-Files: the sci-fi show that was popular from 1993 to 2002 relaunched this week to high viewership, with 20 million people watching its Sunday premiere, outperforming its 2002 finale. Soon we will bring back Full House, which ran from 1987 to 1995 and will return with all but the Olsen twins.
And now – a day we could have only dreamed of – Gilmore Girls is coming back.
Lorelai Gilmore (neé Lauren Graham) officially confirmed it with a selfie on Twitter this afternoon, which is totally how Lorelai would announce things in 2016:
I CAN NOW CONFIRM: it's time for me, and this jacket I stole in 2007, to return to work.@netflix #GilmoreGirls pic.twitter.com/tBb07J9oO1
— Lauren Graham (@thelaurengraham) January 29, 2016
The comedy-drama starring Lauren Graham and Alexis “Rory” Bledel as a mother-daughter duo ran seven seasons from 2000 to 2007 on the WB and the CW. Cast members Scott Patterson, Kelly Bishop, Sean Gunn and Keiko Agena will also return. It will be produced by Warner Bros Television and Dorothy Parker Drank Here Productions. The show’s creator and executive producer Amy Sherman-Palladino and executive producer Daniel Palladino will write and direct it.
Netflix has put the entire Gilmore Girls archive online already, so presumably they have a sense of what the appetite for the revival will be.
Gilmore Girls was a goofy coming-of-age show set in a fictional small New England town, Stars Hollow, and whose scenes mostly took place in a funky old coffeeshop with the handsome barista love interest. The background: Lorelai, who grew up in a wealthy and formal home, got pregnant as a teenager and ran away. When the show opens, her daughter, Rory, is 16 years old, ambitious and studious. After Rory gets accepted to a prestigious private school, Lorelai, now 32, realizes she needs her parents help to pay tuition. They agree, under the condition that the two come for dinner every week. The show unfolds from there.
It was a quirky show, full of literary references. Norman Mailer and Christiane Amanpour both had cameos. Each episode was basically just a volley of witticisms between the two female leads, who were impossibly clever, quick and completely sarcastic.
Thinking about it now, their dry sense of irony, quick wit and self-deprecating jokes will fit perfectly into the age of Twitter.
