The AV Club has a long article about mid-season television shows here. It's pretty interesting. Noel Murray and Scott Tobias are generally such thoughtful and thorough writers that they make me want to stop posting. This article made me feel better about myself, though, because in it, Murray admits that he watched nearly every episode of Joey.
Another thing I feel bad about is the graceless segue I'm about to make. No, seriously. I feel like a nag for complaining about Gilmore Girls so much. It's still a funny little show that does the serious stuff very well as well. Even this season, which, I keep telling you, has not been the strongest, has included some brilliant moments. The Rory-Lorelai schism was a plot point that had to happen, in order to test the show's central conceit, but a story that no one ever really wanted to watch and one that, I'm guessing, even the show's creators, Amy Sherman Palladino and Daniel Palladino, didn't want to write. However, the way the Palladinos tackled that story was almost perfect. I am getting choked up right now just thinking about Rory's dream sequence in which Madeline Albright stepped in as Lorelai, to wish Rory (Alexis Bledel) a happy birthday, delivering exactly the lines Lorelai (Lauren Graham) delivered in the pilot. That could not have been better. Also great was "Friday Night's Alright for Fighting," in which the entire Gilmore family rehashed the first half of the season in a series of dinner conversations, with no connective tissue at all between scenes. This was a complete departure from the way the show is usually constructed, and yet it worked, beautifully.
Mostly, though, I think I'm right to be dissatisfied with how the show is doing this season. It's failing on all of the levels on which it usually succeeds. In terms of long-term plot construction, there's a lot that doesn't make sense: Luke's long-lost daughter, while not that credulity-stretching, was introduced like an Acme anvil; Luke and Lorelai's relationship has deteriorated over a series of misunderstandings so simple that it's hard to resist shouting into the TV; the resolutions of both primary (Rory's absence from Yale) and secondary storylines (Lane and Zack's break-up) have been sketched in so crudely that the throughlines are hard to read.
Scene and episode construction don't work, either. Last night's episode featured a pointless return of Milo Ventimiglia as Jess, Luke's "bad boy" nephew and Rory's Season 3 boyfriend. The scenes among the principles were so ham-handledly written, so artlessly directed and so inefficiently edited, that I felt like I was watching a spin-off in the making. Scene after scene of Jess and his one-off wacky friends played out; Luke (Scott Patterson) and Rory showed up, but any sort of chemistry among the characters, or even a sense that the actors had ever seen each before, was missing. At some point Luke addressed Jess as "nephew." Who does that? Why didn't he just turn to the camera to introduce Jess to the audience at home? That would have been more efficient.
The cast remains incapable of disappointing, however. Last night's saving grace was a throwaway exchange between Lorelai and her mother, Emily (Kelly Bishop). The writing was not particularly sharp and Bishop was playing aspects of Emily we've seen before, but the line delivery saved the whole thing.
Ugh. Sorry about the long rant. -- Peter
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