Twenty-five years ago this month, two highly caffeinated girls made their first appearance on television. Well, girl-women – one a bookish 16-year-old, the other her former 16-and-pregnant mother, the two often blended together into one fast-talking, quick-witted unit. They bantered at 2x speed. They drank cartoonish amounts of coffee – five cups by 8am, if the mother is to be believed. They riffed on everything from Rosemary’s Baby to RuPaul, Jack Kerouac to Britney Spears, West Side Story to Macy Gray. They were the Gilmore girls – Lorelai and Rory, arguably now the most famous and certainly one of the most beloved mother-daughter duos in TV history.
Gilmore Girls, which ran from 2000 until 2007, was not a hit in its time. It never reached a wide audience, won any awards, or got the buzz of its more conventionally dramatic peers. But through word of mouth, DVD swaps, millennial nostalgia and the force of Netflix, the show, created by former Roseanne writer Amy Sherman-Palladino, has become one of the most enduring TV hits of the Y2K era, courting fans born long after it aired. (Between January and June 2023, the first season clocked over 82m views on Netflix, where it has been one of the streamer’s most reliable library series since 2014.) Though a year-round show, its hallmarks – all that coffee, cosy knits, school uniforms – have made it synonymous with autumn, a season that does not exist in Burbank, California, where it filmed on a soundstage for the entirety of its run. Every September, like clockwork, viewers flock to fictional Stars Hollow, Connecticut, putting Gilmore Girls in the top 10 most streamed shows in the US.
