I’m worried about your posture, dear. I’m concerned that it comes from all the looking down. What with your phone and the Xbox and the taxi TV and that music player you wear on your arm and the headphones that look like donuts on your ears, doesn’t it make life so much smaller? If absolutely everything important is only happening on such a small screen, isn’t that a shame? Especially when the world is so overwhelmingly large and surprising? Are you missing too much? You can’t imagine it now, but you’ll look like me one day, even though you’ll feel just the same as you do now. You’ll catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror and think how quickly it’s all gone, and I wonder if all the time you used watching those families whose lives are filmed for the television, and making those cartoons of yourselves with panting dog tongues, and chasing after that terrible Pokémon fellow…well, will it feel like time well spent? “Here lies Ms. Jackson, she took more steps than the other old biddies on her road”—is that the best I can leave behind? Is it all just designed to keep us looking down, or to give us the illusion that we have some sort of control over our chaotic lives?
Will you do me a small favor, dears, and look up? Especially you New Yorkers and Londoners and other city dwellers who cross all those busy streets. How else will you take in the majesty of the buildings that have stood there for hundreds of years? How else will you run into an acquaintance on the street who might turn into a friend or a lover or even just recommend a good restaurant that no one has complained about on that app yet? If you never look out the window of the subway car, how will you see the boats gliding by on the East River, or have an idea that only you could have? Just look up for no reason, just for a moment here and there, or maybe for an entire day once in a while. Let the likes go unchecked and the quality of sleep go unnoticed. Que sera sera, my dears—whatever will be will be, whether we’re tracking it on our GPS devices or not.
Look up! Look up! What you see might surprise you.
Love,
Old Lady Jackson
Spoiler alert! The below contains plot and casting mentions, and some general information you may not want to have until after you’ve seen the new episodes. If you haven’t watched Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life yet, you might want to skip this part until you have.
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Years from now, long after the Downton Abbey reboot (Matthew lives!), the Six Feet Under reboot (literally The Walking Dead!), and the reboot of the Fuller House reboot (don’t be rude. Cut. It. Out. All over again!), I’ll still be trying to explain what it was like to return to Gilmore Girls. That was the first question I got when the show was announced, and the one I’ve been asked most frequently ever since. It’s also a question I don’t feel I’ve quite answered satisfactorily. So far, I’ve just stuttered and stammered and tried to find something to compare it to.
“It’s like getting a chance to go to college all over again, but this time you know what classes to take, and you know how to really appreciate all the, uh, classes, and the people, and, uh…”
No, that’s not what it was like.
“It’s like, if you got back together with an old boyfriend, but now there were only the good parts about him, without all the stuff that bugged you, and you got to fall in love all over again, without making any of the mistakes you made when you, uh…”
No, that’s not it either.
“It’s like if you were diagnosed with a disease, but then the doctors realized they’d made a mistake and you were actually okay, so you experienced the feeling of enjoying every day that much more, because suddenly you’d been reminded how precious the days were, and you were even more thankful to have them because you’d been faced with the reality of how rare they actually are, when before you’d taken the days for granted and thought you were sick but you’re not, and…”
Uh, no.
I have an old email from Amy from December 2014, where she mentions the possibility of taking a pitch out to some streaming services. That must mean that we’d already had our lunch at the Greek restaurant in Los Angeles where she first told me some of her ideas and started sketching out the early plotlines. Inspired by the British series Sherlock, which has no yearly set number of episodes but instead does anywhere from one to four specials, she envisioned four mini-movies that would run about ninety minutes each.
At that lunch, she asked if I’d read the Marie Kondo book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Yes, I had, I replied. She also kept asking me if I’d read Wild and/or seen the movie. Yes to both, I told her, and why was she asking? We hadn’t seen each other in a while and the reality of getting back together to do the show again seemed so far away, which meant we kept getting distracted and going off on tangents and she never really answered me about either. What she was mainly there to ask me was, if it was possible to somehow put this thing together, would I be interested?
Why, yes—yes, I would be.
A few months later, in early spring of 2015, Amy and Dan felt we were inching closer to the reality of making the show at Netflix, but we were still too far away to make any formal announcement. Warner Brothers and Netflix had to agree to a deal first, and then Amy and Dan would go in and pitch the story ideas, or was it the other way around? Would it be better to pitch the ideas first, then see if everyone could make a deal? This was all new territory. The two entities would be paying for the show, and they had to make nice with each other first, and that process was complicated. The existence of streaming was new, rebooting a show on a different network was new, and turning a show that once had been an hour long minus time for commercials into uninterrupted ninety-minute movies was new. And notice that no one was even talking about the actors yet. This could all take a while. “The Green Eggs and Ham deal took eighteen months,” Amy told me. Eighteen months? Also, they’re making Green Eggs and Ham into a movie? Anyway, I knew we didn’t have that much time, in part because of the back lot.
The back lot. Oy.
You’ve heard of the town of Stars Hollow? Well, I’m here to tell you, it is real. It’s a wonderful, happy place with cheerful neighbors, ballerinas taking classes at Miss Patty’s, and a seasonal festival of some sort happening in the town square. It’s a place where the coffee flows freely, junk food has no calories, and Kirk has somehow found yet another job. There, the town meeting might be in session (although I’m usually late for it), with Taylor Doose presiding, and outside, near the gazebo, there could be a hay bale maze set up for your enjoyment. It’s a place where, on one special day every year, I smell snow. If that’s where you’d like to leave your understanding of our beloved town, please skip the next paragraph.
Because sometimes it’s also a place in Los Angeles on the Warner Brothers lot, where other people from other shows come to visit, and sometimes they stay for a while—occasionally for years. Shockingly, it turned out that no one had reserved that spot for us indefinitely and held it frozen in time in the event of our triumphant return. Lots of other shows needed the back lot around the same dates we needed it, so we’d been given a very narrow time frame in which to use it. Obviously, when you’re returning to Stars Hollow, you have to have an actual Stars Hollow. But the reality of the scheduling was that if we couldn’t find a way to start filming by February 2016, basically we wouldn’t be filming at all.
In March 2015, with everything still very much up in the air, we were invited to the ATX Festival in Austin, Texas, for a Gilmore Girls reunion. In my emails with Amy from that time, we discussed where to stay in Austin (the St. Cecilia), our shared eye doctor (Dr. Sacks), and theater (Hand of God—so good! And no, even back then you couldn’t get Hamilton tickets). We also discussed the many rumors that were flying around. I heard the deal was getting close. I heard the deal was falling apart. Scott Patterson went on a podcast and mentioned there were “talks,” which had basically been true since the day the show ended in 2007, but the comment caught fire and people thought he knew more than he was saying, when in fact none of us did. A few weeks after the festival I got a call from my agent saying that he’d finally heard Netflix had committed to making eight to ten episodes of our show. Great news! I emailed Amy, who said she’d heard no such thing.