by: Eliza Moore, Communication major
Debuting in 2000, Gilmore Girls has captured the attention of many viewers for the past two decades. Set in the quaint town of Stars Hollow, Gilmore Girls focuses on a single mother (Lorelai) and her daughter (Rory). The show follows both characters’ lives and their day-to-day struggles with men, the town, their family, and each other. While it centers around the two women, Gilmore Girls also emphasizes the small-town culture of Stars Hollow and its utopic atmosphere. In 2016, Netflix developed Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, an addition to the original running. A Year in The Life features most of Stars Hollow’s prominent main characters while giving a scope into both Lorelai and Rory’s life years after the original series ended. It contains four hour and a half long episodes, each representing one season of the year. It delves into Rory’s failing career as a journalist as well as her complicated love life. It also gives insight to Lorelai’s hotel business, and her love life with partner Luke as well.
While Gilmore Girls was well received by the public, A Year in the Life was not as much of a hit as the original series. This post engages A Year in the Life to argue the show emerged in an age of intersectionality and cultural awareness but appears to be stuck in the colorblindness of the early 2000s. A Year in The Life’s refusal to address the societal and cultural issues congruent with 2016 emphasizes its effort to remain apolitical. While the show’s overall colorblindness was considerably par for the course in the late 1990s and early 2000s, its ongoing representation in 2016 feels ideologically and representationally anachronistic. Put another way, remaining a-political in 2016 is itself a political statement.
In order to explore this idea, this post will focus on how the show centers whiteness. Considering the conversation around race at the time of A Year in the Life’s production, the disregard of racial issues in Stars Hollow disconnects the town from larger social, cultural, and political concerns, converting it into a social idealist space that does not acknowledge racial disparities.
Stars Hollow is a primarily white town with few people of color. The creation of this fictional, white-washed town only re-enforces a white social idealism. Stars Hollow was based off of three small towns in Connecticut: Wallingford, Essex, and Washington. According to census data, Essex and Washington are 94% white and Wallingford is slightly over 90% white. This whiteness bleeds into the show itself, and the ways show runner Amy Sherman-Palladino avoids painting Stars Hollow colorfully.
While there are a few characters of color, they serve primarily to support Rory and Lorelai, two white women. Take Lane for example, who aids Rory’s character development. While she is Korean and may add some diversity to the show, her token-casted character has little character evolution. The same could be said for other characters of color such as Michelle, Gypsy, and Lane’s mother Emily. Not only are these characters stagnant, but their race is also not addressed in the series. Sherman-Palladino’s refusal to address race in 2016 is aiding in centering the white main characters. They all support a white character’s role in the show in some form. Especially considering the conversation around racial issues in 2016, it is clear A Year in The Life intentionally avoids any form of racial conversation.
The year of 2016 was by no means an uneventful year. The events surrounding the Ferguson Trial pushed white Americans to look more at racial disparities while an election spurred a tense political climate. It is difficult to imagine that the characters in Gilmore Girls would even be able to remain a-political in 2016, especially the characters of color. It seems that A Year in The Life is unable to address its own politics in the divisive swarm of 2016. This mentality of neutrality only pushes the 2000s colorblindness apparent in the original series.
This may have been able to fly in the early 2000s with the original running of Gilmore Girls, but A Year in the Life continues the ideals of a colorblind world centering around the struggles of white main characters. What is this saying about privilege? While Lorelai and Rory do face struggles (Rory struggles to find a job, for instance), the show does a poor job in recognizing their privilege as two able bodied, white women from a background of wealth. The series’ apolitical ideology is making a statement about colorblindness by averting Rory’s white privilege and recreating a white social idealism. Rory has a journalism degree from Yale that was paid for entirely by her wealthy grandparents; a privilege opening countless doors of opportunities for her future. Yet the show depicts her in a world of struggles and closed-doors. While obviously any person will face struggles in life, the show refuses to even touch on the privilege Rory attains. This only serves to centralize a white narrative, leaving no room to address disparities among the characters of color.
The show provides specific instances where it constructs a particular narrative for where people of color belong in A Year in the Life. Most characters of color hold a working class position in which a white character is in authority, and often disrespects them. One example of this is Emily’s (Loreli’s mother) interaction with her Hispanic maid. Emily is trying to converse with her and becomes flustered because she can’t understand the maid who is speaking Spanish. She then asks for someone to retrieve the gardener in order to interpret the maid for her. This scene takes place in Emily’s home, with Loreli present. Throughout the entire series, Emily is known for her pretentious nature and unreachable standards. She repetitively fires and rehires maids, most of them being women of color. While this specific interaction may have been intended to poke fun of Emily, it emphasizes the shallow narrative afforded people of color in A Year in the Life. These women are often sidelined, mistreated, and stereotyped. They exist in relation to Emily only to serve her and obey her daily wishes. A similar example exists in episode three, in which Rory’s friend Paris becomes flustered when speaking about her Hispanic nanny. She complains that she hasn’t “paid off the last nanny” (inferring she would potentially fire the current one) and is frustrated that the current nanny hasn’t brought her kids downstairs because she didn’t want to walk up the stairs herself. Although the show is painting Paris in a harsh way, the crude remarks go seemingly unnoticed by the other characters. In A Year in the Life, women of color are depicted primarily as support to white families. These examples may even push beyond the show’s colorblindness by reinstating a world in which people of color are there only to hold working class positions. These roles only push the original running’s shallow narrative for people of color.
A Year in The Life certainly did not have as much of a following as the original running, with some calling it “a slap in the face to “Gilmore Girls” fans.” Fans found it monotonous with similar dialogue and recurring events that needed to remain with the original running. Perhaps the public’s response to A Year in the Life emphasizes its stagnant nature, and inability to advance with the times.
It is clear that Gilmore Girls is a colorblind show, with little diversity and limited narratives for people of color. Revolving around two white women with a background of wealth, Gilmore Girls retains an apolitical ideology, avoiding conversations which may be potentially controversial to an imagined mainstream audience by pretending those conversations do not exist. While this may be congruent with most popular television of the early 2000s, 2016 offered an opportunity for the producers to promote a more diverse and representative Stars Hollow in A Year in The Life. Sherman-Palladio certainly had a chance to redeem the white-centered world in Gilmore Girls, but A Year in The Life continues the original running’s idealism of a white-centered world through its refusal to address any character’s race. As awareness regarding racial, cultural, and social issues are continuously being pushed in our world today, a-political programming is, then, not a-political at all. It demonstrates a commitment to avoid, rather than to confront important issues. If television continues to divert from addressing racial issues, it will only continue to center whiteness.
