In Which We Find Ourselves Calling Out For Lorelai In The Night

The Same Mistakes

by CATHERINE ENGH

In October seven long seasons of Amy Sherman-Palladino’s Gilmore Girls were made available on Netflix. This means that instead of having to wait an entire week to see another episode in which nothing essentially happens, Netflix subscribers and their friends can now watch two, even three episodes back-to-back.

For those who saw Gilmore Girls unfold on the WB thirteen years ago, the re-watch promises to be a nostalgia trip, if nothing else. The show is the same, but we’re all older, our judgments are different. I’ve found, for one, that Jess and his beat poetry are far less alluring than they once were. It’s hard to believe that he has it in him to care about anything but his car and his hair gel. Shouldn’t Rory want to smooch a nice guy like Dean?

A little background: Gilmore Girls depicts the social universe of Stars Hollow—a fictional town an hour’s drive from Hartford. We know everyone there is to know here, down to the guitar player who busks on the street corner. At the bottom of the character- hierarchy are the unnamed laborers who work in the kitchen at the local Inn.

At the top are Lorelei and Rory, a mother-daughter pair who tell each other everything because they are also BFFs. There’s an inescapable dynamic between the two: they consume a ton of coffee and food together, they drop all kinds of allusions to indie culture. They can be a bit annoying—cliquish and self-satisfied—but it’s the kind of thing you can forgive. The other characters on the show certainly do.

Alexis Bledel, the actress who played Pete’s troubled love object on Mad Men, is Rory, a high school student with big ambitions to go to Harvard, become a journalist and travel to all of the nation-states featured on posters around her room. We don’t know why Rory is so uncompromising about her goals, Harvard in particular. What we do know is that if Rory doesn’t make the same mistakes as her mother — i.e. get pregnant — then she’ll go to an Ivy League University and that, somehow, will make everything okay for everyone.

Lauren Graham, recently of NBC’s Parenthood, plays Lorelei. Gilmore Girls repackages the story of Lorelei’s fall from grace more times than it should be possible. The story is simple: Lorelei becomes pregnant as a teen and when she doesn’t want to marry Rory’s father, she leaves her conservative parents’ home and moves in at the fittingly named Independence Inn. The change turns out to be a boon: Lorelei becomes Inn manager and no longer has to suffer the oppressions of life with Richard and Emily Gilmore — parents who never really understood her or her rapid-fire jokes.

Everything is going swimmingly for the Gilmore girls until we learn, in the pilot, that Rory has gotten into Chilton, a fancy prep school. Lorelei can’t afford to replace the girls’ lumpy couch and she definitely can’t afford to pay the Chilton tuition. Richard and Emily agree to cover it on one condition: Lorelei and Rory eat dinner with them every Friday night. It shouldn’t be such a bad deal but Lorelei’s pregnancy stands like a traumatic memory that no one can incorporate — over and over again, it recurs, disrupting the tenuous relationships that everyone in the Gilmore family is trying to cultivate.

The Gilmore girls are, like Cher in Clueless, long deluded about their attraction to the important men in their lives. Lorelei represses her feelings for the town’s diner owner; Rory does the same for the local bad boy. Sherman-Palladino draws these self-deceptions out to such lengths that sometimes it feels like she just wants to keep us watching, wondering if the next episode will be the one where one of the girls finally admits to the obvious and couples with the person she is supposed to be with.

Oftentimes, the supporting characters are more fun to watch than Rory and Lorelei. Melissa McCarthy is wonderful as Sookie, the brilliant but clumsy cook at the Independence Inn. Keiko Agena reaches manic heights as Rory’s friend Lane. Living under the authority of a cartoonishly tyrannical mother, Lane’s uneasy mix of resentment and obligation drives her to make many an impulsive decision.

Liza Weil plays Rory’s friend Paris — an intensely driven student who vies with Rory for academic plaudits. Paris exudes all the A-type energy that we don’t get from Rory because we’re supposed to see her as a singular character with sympathies and inner depths. I enjoy Sookie, Lane and Paris so much that I like to think of their frenetic energy as a dissenting outcry against their relatively minor status on the show.

Sherman-Palladino conjures all kinds of drama around the issues of sex and pregnancy, an aspect of Gilmore Girls that grew very tiresome very quickly the second time around. ‘Gilmore Girls’ wants to recover the great old virtue of feminine modesty but, for the modern woman, virginity is for Harvard, not marriage. The Rory-Dean and Rory-Jess narratives function like seduction plots: the premarital sex act looms, ever present, as a potential threat to Rory’s expectations. If Rory has sex with either one of her boyfriends, it will ruin her chances of getting into Harvard. Lorelei frets about Rory’s sexuality, she rewards her for putting off the deed but never once does she bring up birth control. And she’s supposed to be a cool mom!

There’s much about Gilmore Girls that still works. The show's asymmetrical character structure speaks of a world in which few go to Yale and many are the nameless laborers who work at the local inn. The trope of the woman who doesn’t know her own feelings dramatizes what happens when the head and the heart aren’t working in synch. But the seduction plot, which tells of the social regulation of women’s bodies, is anathema in a show that’s supposed to be about two progressively minded gals living in the 21st century.

Catherine Engh is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York. She last wrote in these pages about her grandmother.

"Sun Shy (acoustic)" - Dresses (mp3)

"Tell A Lie (acoustic)" -  Dresses (mp3)

In Which No One's Dad In Real Life Looks Like Peter Krause

Braving It With the Family

by QICHEN ZHANG

Maybe if we didn't allow him to wear a pirate costume to school, he would fit in a little bit better.

— Parenthood's Adam Braverman, played by Peter Krause

Television's always been slow to pick up on parental irony. I probably wouldn't find Adam Braverman's delivery of a banal line so guffaw-worthy otherwise. To segue the family TV genre into a wholesomely sarcastic direction, NBC's new show Parenthood rallies Krause and a diverse cast (diverse meaning Joy Bryant as the token black character) in an attempt to portray real-to-life family issues without any syrupy ethical undertones, without any cultish evangelist propaganda, and — most importantly — without the sixties hair.

TV is so avant-garde these days.

To catch up, one sentence sums up the plot — a family living in Berkeley headed by a grandfather/grandmother couple with four smaller nuclear families living in northern California maneuvers around the tensions of their criss-crossing relationships. At face value, the show sounds mundane at best, a contemporary American Dreams at worst. With mostly B-list actors who peaked in movies with titles like Let's Go to Prison and How to Rob a Bank, the cast's potential to depict domestically-oriented characters seem initially dubious as well. But after giving it a chance, I realized that throwing a Berkeley hippie into the mix would've just complicated the weird, almost-incestuous, boyfriend-sharing debacle that pops up in later episodes of this falsely tame debut. NBC. Who could've guessed?

But isn't this northern California? Scandals don't create Parenthood's entertainment value. Instead, the show relies on character quirks for its draw. Even though the Braverman clan appears as though the members came out of an assembly line at the perfect-All-American-family factory, the script takes surprisingly humorous digs at the paradigms of kin.

Juggling both a son with Asperger's Syndrome and a teenager daughter who just started shopping at Victoria's Secret, Adam's bottle-blond wife Kristina (Monica Potter) acts as the doting and patient mother until you realize her stammering is just the beginning of her control-freak neuroses. Julia (Erika Christensen), the youngest Braverman sibling and feminist corporate lawyer, still eats dinner with her husband and daughter in their sleek kitchen, but only to project her personal competitiveness onto her soon-to-be-OCD kid at meal times and to make her husband feel insecure for cleaning so much as a stay-at-home dad.

It would be easy to assume that Parenthood's producers simply took Girl, Interrupted and removed all the knives and pills, if it weren't for the fact that Adam and Kristina's huge house in Berkeley's 'burbs looks too welcoming to double as an insane asylum.

Sadly, the next generation of Bravermans don't live up to their complicated adult counterparts. Haddie (Sarah Ramos), with enough teenage insecurities to fill up her pink Jansport backpack, gives off a more than irritating vibe as a sullen, typical, and over-privileged suburbanite. The inclusion of her edgier, pseudohipster cousin Amber Holt (Mae Whitman) in the show aims to balance Haddie's tall, blond goodness with a short, brunette hipster who moves into Berkeley with a too-cool-for-school attitude and an entire wardrobe from Urban Outfitters (fake glasses included).

A lapse in good script judgment — or lack of story ideas — further makes Amber out as an immature, boy-obsessed dunce, especially when Haddie and Amber get into a bitchfight during gym class about Amber sleeping with Haddie's scrawny boyfriend. Slogging through plotlines that make American middle-class teenagers look the fools, Sarah Ramos and Mae Whitman with their one dimensional performances make the show's Tuesday night counterpart The Biggest Loser look like intellectual fare. With the exception of Drew, Amber's introverted brother played who's SuPeR dReAmY in that soft-spoken way, the Braverman teenagers make a hysterectomy sound not only necessary but pleasant.

Having kids is so rewarding. Um. Yeah. Unquestionably, Whitman's character would've been better as a nonchalant ne'er-do-well, but her idiotic conversations with her mother about moving in with her boyfriend and, like, totally loving him always escalate into shrill, overdramatic chicken squawking and destroys the possibility for collected coolness in a deafening way. Get a grip! You're from Fresno, not a farm.

The kids are all right?

And the recasting of Graham to replace Maura Tierney — originally slated to play Sarah Braverman who left the show to deal with breast cancer treatment — doesn't exactly do the show favors either. What hopes I had for her television comeback dried up from the frictional heat of her never-ending babble, whether she's screaming at her over-processed daughter or covering up her awkward flubs at diner lunches with her siblings. Blaming the irritating pace of Graham's delivery on the writers resolves only a part of the problem. Soon, you start to realize that Graham basically started her new show where her old one left off. As the daughter who never managed to get her life together with no college degree toting sassy offspring, it's like we're back in Connecticut all over again, only with better weather this time.

Sarah, without a precociously wise daughter to fire back in witty repartée or a scheming, bougey mother to make her look like the good guy, doesn't pull off the friend-mother role in what Graham's treating as Gilmore Girls: The Sequel. Instead, she's stuck stuttering like a moron into the phone while she looks for her runaway daughter, making her look more incompetent parent than an insightful "frother."

It's not like the woman can't act — after all, of all jobs Graham could've bagged after Gilmore Girls wrapped, she took on the role of a biblical wife with realistic aplomb and without wearing Jesus sandals. Parenthood provides a storyline with plenty of opportunities for sharp quips and introspective performances, but Graham refuses to budge from the comfort of Lorelai's nervous and energetic rambling, something that doesn't work within an ensemble cast where Krause's calm Adam just ends up making anxiety-ridden Graham's Sarah look dumb. After 10-plus episodes, I pin it to sheer acting laziness. So I stayed up on a Tuesday night for this?

But a huge surprise redeems Graham's disappointing job and allows for another low-key actor's potential comeback. As Crosby Braverman, Dax Shepard somehow manages to make the youngest, most irresponsible member of the middle generation look the most in touch with reality. Granted, the producers took a cheap shot and stuck the usual black sheep into the family ensemble for variety's sake. But the casting of Shepard as a born-again father when he discovers his old girlfriend gave birth to their son Jabbar — which could've backfired given his history in über-family-friendly shows Punk'd and King of the Hill — is supported by his kooky take on the bachelor who refuses to settle down until forced to do so.

When the rest of his family becomes conceitedly embroiled in their own lives, Crosby reminds us that there's nothing wrong with just chillin' on a house boat, playin' some ping pong. With Type-A Adam and Julia fending off husband-and-wife problems in power suits, Crosby brings some laid-back attitude without breaking out the NorCal weed once. In an odd Zach-Braff-on-Scrubs manner but without the annoying exaggeration and overt displays of "Look at me! I'm madcap and funny!", Shepard uses his honest goofiness paired with an emotional conscience for his new task as his son's role model in order to legitimize himself as a "serious actor," leaving behind his days making movies in a New Mexico Costco.

Or maybe he just learned how to frownIt could be the onslaught of vampire fantasy dramas within the past two seasons. It could be that fat people losing weight is now considered prime entertainment. Whatever the reason, at the end of the past few Tuesday nights, I like Parenthood. I didn't mind that taken as a whole, the manufactured Braverman family resembled all the rest in television history. If the dialogue's this perfectly laced with sarcasm, I can take some of the more predictable moments.

If Peter Krause actually existed as a suburban dad in real life, I wouldn't mind moving to Berkeley for a piece of that jawline. And after the season finale in which Haddie dyed her hair black, maybe she'll be less angsty and more cool come September. In this age of hipsters where everyone is only allowed to like things ironically, Ron Howard's latest project lets me feel genuine for once. (With a hipster on the show to boot! OH, THE IRONY.)

After watching the season finale on Tuesday, I thought I had come to a neat little conclusion. Alas, NBC had again resorted to packaging a cute, family-oriented program into an hour-long dramedy dominated by levelheaded men complemented with their shrill overstrung wives and sisters, handing the viewer a challenge of making sense out of it. Looking back at past mediocre dramas like 7th Heaven, American Dreams, and even supposedly realistic but actually voyeuristic Friday Night Lights — Parenthood follows the lead of its many, many, many, many, many (press one for English, oprima numero dos para espanol) predecessors.

This is real life... I guess.This conclusion was promptly destroyed when Grandfather Zeek threw a first-class hissy fit at the dinner table when his own children attempted to help his property insolvency issues. Try as he may to ease into the warm and fluffy family genre, Craig T. Nelson flounders almost as much as his bald mullet. Whether acting gruff after cheating on his wife or bickering with his children in a redneck accent, the charm of senile seniority is lost on me. Kudos to Nelson for knowing how to channel maternal and menopausal onscreen — I just really wish he could've let Graham take over those reins.

Even though his character fails miserably at imparting wisdom even at his age, Nelson may singlehandedly make Parenthood must-see TV. You can't help but respect NBC a little more for breaking the mold and turning the usually wise and caring grandfather into a certifiable jackass who congratulates his granddaughter on standing her ground "when that boy was trying to get you to have intercourse with him."

Did I also mention they made Jason Ritter grow a 'stache and goatee combo?

Qichen Zhang is the senior contributor to This Recording. She last wrote in these pages about Gilmore Girls. She tumbls here.

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