Remember when Willow raises her BFF Buffy from the dead and Buffy is really pissed because her friends didn't let her RIP? Well, today Netflix's Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos dropped some serious hints to the UK's Press Association that there might be another Gilmore Girls reboot coming soon, if creator Amy Sherman-Palladino and executive producer Daniel Palladino oblige.
“The worst thing is to wait a couple of years for your favorite show to come back and for it to disappoint you"—NO SHIT, SARANDOS—“but they sure delivered and people were really excited about more, and we have been talking to them about the possibility of that.”
If by "delivered" Sarandos means "crushed people when they were most vulnerable in the dark days of late November 2016," then yes, the Palladinos certainly delivered. They left the show after season six, and Gilmore Girls ended in 2007, following season seven. A decade later, the couple partnered with Netflix to resurrect the quippy mother-daughter dramedy for Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, four longer episodes that gave them the chance leave things the way they'd originally intended to leave them—with four words.
The problem is that those four words sucked. Here's a refresher slash MAJOR SPOILER ALERT: Rory turns to Lorelei and says “Mom?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m pregnant.”
Sherman-Palladino later suggested that she'd always intended for the story to come full circle, and that Rory's pregnancy reflected "that curveball that life throws you."
But I have some news: Life is not a circle. It does not "throw" you anything. This is not baseball. Life is a squiggly line that twists and turns feverishly for years until it dumps you into the empty void of death. In the same interview, Sherman-Palladino noted that "Rory doesn’t have to keep the baby"—the first peep we've heard from her or her characters about abortion, save for the silent inclusion of a Planned Parenthood poster in Rory's college dorm room.
The way Gilmore Girls' creators handle reproductive health (both in A Year in the Life and earlier seasons) is disappointing—see Lorelei's teen pregnancy with Rory, Lane's reluctant pregnancy with twins, and now Rory's unexpected pregnancy. Watching the reboot felt like entering a world where birth control and abortion were never mentioned because they weren't even an option—which is pretty tone deaf and surreal in the worst way, since our real-life government is actively trying to defund Planned Parenthood.
Here's to hoping that if the series does come back for another round, its writers do better by their characters and accept this fantastic alternate ending proposed by the Mercury's Senior Editor Megan Burbank:
So here's how ASP can earn my forgiveness: The inevitable follow-up to A Year in the Life opens with Lorelai and Lane taking Rory to Planned Parenthood. Then Rory and Jess get drunk together and laugh about how she almost got saddled with a Logan baby, Rory singlehandedly shepherds the Stars Hollow Gazette into the 21st century and it wins awards for local news reporting, and she publishes her memoir with Jess' small press. It gets optioned for TV (too obvious?). She takes a job with the Philadelphia Inquirer because Philly is where Jess lives and she's a dogged investigative reporter, then parlays that into a gig with CNN. She and Christiane Amanpour high-five next to a foxhole. She has a kid later, or she doesn't, because honestly who cares, full circle can happen whenever. The rest of the follow-up episodes are dedicated to real storylines for Paris, Emily, and Sookie.Logan dies in a tragic jetski accident.
Fin.