How was your First Time?
I'll show you mine...
My first ever episode of Gilmore Girls was the one where Lorelai picks Rory up from the police station for stealing a yacht.
I’d recorded it on the PVR and why I chose it eludes me now… Perhaps after finishing Joss Whedon’s and Aaron Sorkin’s back catalogues I wanted to find something great and found it on someone’s list alongside The West Wing and Buffy. I still do that to find new favourite books.
As soon as the episode wrapped, I played it again. Then again. I was already addicted. There was some magic in the show, something about the quickfire banter, the optimism and the wackiness that became an alchemy.
The actors were so generous with the funniness, gags would spill over gags and I’d have to physically stop myself laughing so I could hear them out. It was like trying to hold in hiccups. At the end I’d be in this weird meditative state, sated and content like after one of their legendary takeout dinners.
Of course it didn’t hurt that that the mum and the daughter were disarmingly attractive. For a good few episodes I couldn’t decide who I was drawn to more, the mum or the daughter. That made things awkward when the show ended and they re-ran it again from the beginning. I was that guy in the diner, chatting up a suddenly underage Rory.
But then I got to enjoy it all over again, watching them both grow and grow up, reaching for the tissues at Rory’s graduation. Yearning for Lorelai to succeed and find happiness and watching their relationships with boys (and Lorelai’s parents) blossom and fade.
I laughed like they were in the room with me. My eyes still get prickly just thinking about the la-la-la’s like a Pavlovian response.
This was about five years ago, when they’d already wrapped the final season. There wouldn’t be any more. When I circled back round to the yacht episode, I watched the whole run twice more.
Then I started grasping for whatever information I could get my hands on. I just needed more because nothing else seemed to fill that void.
I learned why the last season seemed to just replay the highlights from the other seasons. I followed the exploits of the cast members as they went their separate ways, saw their movies and TV appearances. I watched some of the DVD extras but I haven’t seen all of them – it’s like I’m keeping some for an emergency when I really, really need it and nothing else will do.
Then I needed to vent and share this mania, so I ended up right here, on GilmoreNews.com [as it was then! –Rich]. I posted a couple of comments, then Bunheads turned up and I started contributing and now we’re where we are.
You see, for me, Gilmore Girls is a special chicken soup for the soul, beamed direct from brain of the Mad Hatter herself, Amy Sherman-Palladino. Thank you, Amy. And for creating [GilmoreNews.com] and letting me write, thanks Arieanna!
All this is a very long-winded way of welcoming the recent spate of new commenters who’ve posted in the last few weeks and also to set up this question:
How was your first time?
What was your first episode?
Who introduced you?
Did you gorge on it?
Or were you an original viewer, having to wait each week for the next episode, bearing months of hiatus between seasons?