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The Gilmore Girls Revival Bums Me Out

*No spoilers here!* (I think idk but don’t get mad because tbh I think there’s a statute of limitations on spoilers but really there’s no spoilers.)

Guys I loved the Gilmore Girls series when I was younger. I wasn’t one of those that was on board from the first episode – I think a friend introduced me to it a couple seasons in and we would watch the series on DVD. And we loved it.

I loved everything about it. I loved the complexity of Lorelei. And Rory. And how they understood each other. I had (fine, have) the biggest crush on Luke. I’m #TeamJess forever (SORRY NOT SORRY loud and proud for Jess, baby).

But you know, the thing I loved even more than the show itself was who I watched the show with. I love that Ashley and Lyndsay and Rachel and I would commandeer the television as our moms cooked and put in disc after disc (yes you spoiled Netflix babies life was not so easy for us). I loved that we would watch it late at night and at the end of the episode we would analyze our relationships in light of what we had seen. I loved the place in life that I was at, I love looking back and seeing what was yet undiscovered for me. We were young and fresh and Gilmore Girls was a marker for that.

But I was not excited to see that a new series was coming out.
Here’s why.

In the 20-teens we have gotten a little out of hand with our immediate gratification syndrome. We are a few years into this ‘all the information in the world at our fingertips’ thing and we’re getting bored. We can watch anything we want, any time we want to watch, no need to wait for TGIF or Saturday morning cartoons. Everything is accessible to us 24/7.

I remember when I used to stay home sick from school, there was a channel that would run SNL re-runs in the afternoon. I loved it. But it was only one episode and then it was back to the boredom of infomercials or daytime talk shows. (Being sick from school in the 90s was the pits, man.) But not anymore. Everything is accessible to us all the time. We don’t have to wait for anything anymore. We can listen to Christmas music on our XM radio in June. We can order things and have it on our doorstep in 24 hours, or sooner. We can know things immediately. There is no waiting.

And now, with all these series revivals, we have a cheapened parody of something we love. Seriously, watching the first episode I said to my friend that I felt like I was watching an SNL sketch. It’s not real anymore. The magic is gone. Because magic doesn’t last forever.

We are desperately grabbing at that ‘anything we want, anytime we want it’ rope and pulling on everything. And we’re cheapening magic in the process. We mar the beauty of waiting, we mar the memory of things we loved, like shows from our youth that we watched with our giggling friends, movies that were magical to us as kids, toys we loved – we mar their memory by desperately trying to recreate them and keep them as our own. We can’t accept that we can’t have something, whether we shouldn’t have it yet, or we had it and it is gone.

Something new, please. Something more.

We as adults are instant gratification people and yet we discipline children for the same thing. “Be patient,” we tell them. “The cookie is all gone,” we tell them. “It’s not good for you to have another. Be thankful for what you got,” we tell them.

But we as adults have forgotten how to do this. We’ve forgotten how to let the past be the past, to love it for what it was, and to enjoy it. Money-makers are ravaging our memory and telling us it’s not good enough, want more, watch more, consume, consume, eat. We are forgetting how to be thankful for what came before, to look back fondly on the evenings we spent curled up under a blanket with our mom or sister or best friends and watch a show about women. It’s not enough. We want more. Feed us. Now.

And yet we grow up. Our children grow up. We can’t stop it. We can’t go back. Our relationships evolve. The world keeps moving on and as hard as we try, we can’t control everything. Maybe these show revivals, these movie re-makes are a way for us to try. More likely, it’s people who know they can fill their pockets with our inability to move on.

We have lost the beauty of the moment. And watching that show at 33 isn’t the same. Because while it can give us back some of the characters and it can present a modified version of what we loved, it can’t give us back the place in life we were at when we loved it. I can’t get back those late night secrets. And that…is okay. That is how it is supposed to be.

In November I went to see the Prince tribute at the Indianapolis Symphony (it was my birthday gift to myself and it was awesome). They of course ended with Purple Rain and you can’t imagine how gorgeous it was with the orchestra. When the guy started the guitar solo I raised my phone to take a video but immediately put it back down. ‘Be here,’ I told myself. ‘Just be here.’

Be. Here. Be in this moment. If you do that, you will lose this moment. If you don’t capture it on your phone or recreate it, it will leave you. That’s what moments do. Moments are not forever, for everyone to see. That’s being alive – having a multitude of moments that touch you and leave. You can’t keep them. You can’t hold them in your hand. You can’t go back. And you can’t get them back. They leave and a new one comes. And there is beauty in that. And when we fight and demand to recreate that moment, to give ourselves ‘that moment’ again…it is disappointing. It is a microwaved hamburger in the place of the grilled steak that once was.

Be here now. The past isn’t better than the now. There are new things, good new things for you here and to come. Those magic things are happening here and now, you just don’t see it until later. And when later comes, you can look back and see the magic – but you have to be here, fully alive, fully full of joy to be. here. now.