2000
Gilmore Girls premieres
The WB debuted a fast-talking comedy drama about a young mother and her daughter in a small Connecticut town, and its following kept growing.
Gilmore Girls premiered on The WB on October 5, 2000. Created by Amy Sherman-Palladino, it followed Lorelai Gilmore, a single mother played by Lauren Graham, and her bookish teenage daughter Rory, played by Alexis Bledel, in the fictional town of Stars Hollow, Connecticut. Lorelai had Rory at 16 and ran away from her wealthy parents. In the pilot, she has to ask them for money to send Rory to an elite private school. They agree on one condition: dinner with them every Friday night. That weekly ritual drove much of the drama that followed.
Sherman-Palladino came from writing half-hour sitcoms, and The WB approved the idea after turning down several of her earlier pitches. She based Stars Hollow on a visit to Washington, Connecticut, where she stayed at the Mayflower Inn and was struck by its small-town warmth. She wanted a family show that would not bore parents or talk down to children, and she took the rapid patter of 1930s screwball comedies as a model. The pilot was among the first network shows to get funding from the Family Friendly Programming Forum, a group of major advertisers.
Bledel had no acting experience when she was cast. The pilot was filmed in Unionville, outside Toronto, and the rest of the series on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, California, where crews scattered fake leaves or fake snow on the town square to suggest a New England autumn or winter.
Why it matters
The show’s ratings were never huge, but for the smaller WB they were a success, and it became one of the network’s flagship series. Critics praised its quick, reference-filled dialogue and its portrait of three generations of women. It ran for seven seasons, moving to The CW after a 2006 network merger, and ended on May 15, 2007. Time later put it on its list of the 100 best TV shows of all time.
Its second life proved even larger. Streaming on Netflix from 2014 brought a new generation of viewers, and in 2016 the original cast returned for the four-part revival Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life. Every autumn, viewing of the show rises again, and fans gather each October at an unofficial festival in Connecticut.
Did you know?
In its whole original run, the show earned only one Emmy nomination, for makeup, and it won.
