Gilmore Girls Season 1, Episode 1
"Pilot"
Original airdate: October 5, 2000
Writer: Amy Sherman-Palladino
Director: Lesli Linka Glatter
Cast: Lauren Graham, Alexis Bledel, Melissa McCarthy, Keiko Agena, Yanic Truesdale, Scott Patterson, Kelly Bishop, Edward Herrmann
The opening notes of The La’s “There She Goes” play as we get our first glimpse of Stars Hollow, Connecticut. We dip down and follow Lorelai Gilmore (Lauren Graham) into Luke’s, the town diner. She begs the owner, Luke Danes (Scott Patterson), for more coffee. He chides her for her addiction and health choices, before giving in and pouring her another cup. Soon, Lorelai’s daughter Rory (Alexis Bledel) arrives, they have a fast-paced exchange about makeup, complete with pop culture references—RuPaul, Macy Gray—before telling off a man who tries hitting on the underaged Rory. Cut to opening titles. “If you’re out on the road…”
Few shows are as instantly confident in their voice as Gilmore Girls is in its pilot episode, which establishes the series as a wholly original work. Gilmore Girls is cool, funny, fast, and loose. Character relationships are all immediately fleshed out and will only become more complicated and engaging as it goes along.
Over the course of its seven original seasons + one revival season, the show will be, at points, great and terrible, charming and charmless, comforting and irritating. It features some of the best episodes in TV history and some of the worst. Rory has a handful of boyfriends and you’ll almost certainly hate them all a little (maybe a lot). You’ll probably hate Rory plenty, and Lorelai, and Luke too (it’s honestly remarkable that a work so associated with cozy autumnal vibes is also so willing to show its main characters at their absolute worst). The series itself also becomes hateable at times—especially during its awful seventh season.
In other words, my recaps of Gilmore Girls will be the antithesis of my Freaks and Geeks recaps. F&G is my favorite T.V. show of all time, and it’s seldom I’ve had much bad to say about it. Gilmore Girls is a show I love, but it’s also one with lots to criticize, capable of infuriating me at points. Even in its best seasons, there are inevitably some duds. It’s a rollercoaster. And it’s also wonderful. Hop on.
After the cold open introduces us to Luke’s, we’re brought to another important location, the Independence Inn, which Lorelai helps manage. Here, we meet Michel Gerard (Yanic Truesdale), the sardonic French concierge, and Sookie St. James (Melissa McCarthy), the inn’s neurotic, obsessive, yet very sweet chef and Lorelai’s best friend. (We also meet Drella, the inn’s aggressive, annoyed harpist played by Alex Borstein—a character who seems like she’s going to be more important but only sticks around for four episodes). We learn, through somewhat awkward exposition, that Lorelai and Sookie have dreams of opening their own inn, before Lorelai receives the news that kicks things into motion: Rory has been accepted into Chilton, a prestigious prep school.
Rory is an exceptional kid, the girl who actually does the assignment in class while the girls around her pass around nail polish and gossip. She reads the classics and has dreams of going to Harvard and travelling around the world as a journalist. Her ambitions are remarkable, contrasting her mother’s down-to-Earth energy. Lorelai, who got pregnant with Rory at sixteen, wants so badly for her daughter to achieve her every hope and dream. But then, a boy enters the picture.
Dean Forester (Jared Padalecki) wears a leather jacket, has soft hair, and is deeply interested in Rory, down to knowing what book she’s reading before she even knows who he is. He’s the cool, yet sensitive boy every mother fears, and he throws a wrench right in the Gilmores’ plans, as Rory begins rethinking whether she wants to go to Chilton after all.
Or, should I say, he throws another wrench into their plans. The first major hiccup comes with the bill—“a lot of zeros,” Lorelai says. At risk of losing the opportunity, Lorelai is forced to call her parents, the last people on the planet she wants to ask a favor from. And the people whom the first half of this episode was missing.
For how comforting Gilmore Girls can be, it also thrives in conflict. So in the last half of the pilot, it finds its footing, with the introduction of Lorelai’s parents, Richard and Emily Gilmore. Kelly Bishop, who plays Emily, is the standout of the series, completely selling a character who is often awful and cruel, but who nevertheless feels real and alive, and whose tumultuous relationship with her daughter is truly dynamic, their every interaction carrying decades’ worth of baggage (baggage hinted at less gracefully in the awkward zoom-ins on Lorelai’s childhood photos). In the relationship that Graham and Bishop mold between their characters, the show goes from fun, light television to something actually transcendent.
Meanwhile, Edward Herrmann, who plays Richard, is immediately a standout comedic performer. The way he casually hands Rory a section of his newspaper during a moment of awkward silence and his description of the insurance industry—“People die, we pay; people crash cars, we pay; people lose a foot, we pay”—are easily the funniest moments of a quite funny pilot episode.
Lorelai doesn’t want to ask her parents for money, and the salt in the wound is that, as soon as she shows up on their doorstep (on a non-holiday), they know she needs money. They agree to pay for Rory’s schooling, on two conditions: weekly dinners every Friday and an additional weekly phone call. These Friday dinners become a staple, where the true meat of the show often shows itself, and the first one already shows plenty of drama.
Before they even show up, Lorelai and Rory are in the middle of a fight over Rory’s desire to abandon Chilton for a boy. And things don’t get any better once dinner begins. From Lorelai’s inappropriate cracking of jokes (“An education is the most important thing in the world, next to family." “And pie!”) to Richard’s awkwardly bringing up Rory’s dad Christopher’s Internet startup, things heat up until Emily and Lorelai are in the kitchen, dishing out all their resentments. Lorelai got pregnant and then cut her parents out of her life, Emily fumes. Because, Lorelai responds, Emily and Richard were suffocating. And during this loud argument, hearable from the other room, the two unintentionally reveal to Rory that Lorelai went to them for money. And so, Rory decides that Chilton is more important than a boy, snapping out of her temporary crush-brain and thanking her mother for all she’s willing to sacrifice for her.
We end where we began, at Luke’s Diner, as Lorelai asks about Dean, and Luke appears in a dress shirt, having cleaned up for a meeting at the bank. A sparkle in Lorelai’s eyes shows another crush brewing, one that will take many seasons to come to fruition. In the meantime, the Girls and Luke’s dynamic is as dependable as the rising sun. “You do not want to grow up to be like your mom,” he tells Rory, trying to dissuade her from stuffing her face with chili fries. “Sorry, too late,” she answers. Fade out to “My Little Corner of the World.” And we are off.
Grade: B+
