"Gilmore Girls" Continues To Get Love From End-Of-Decade Lists

With 2009 almost over, it seems every critic in America is posting lists of their favorites of this decade, with Gilmore Girls featuring prominently on many of these lists.

Daniel Feinberg of HitFix placed the show at number eighteen on his list of the best shows of the decade and even penned a lengthy essay on the appeal of the show. Like many, he inititally was not interested in the show because it appeared too similar to 7th Heaven , but in the end, he was won over by the richness of the writing, and the stellar portrayals of the main characters by Lauren Graham and Alexis Bledel. He makes a really great point about the constant mistakes the characters seem to make, which is one of my favorite aspects of the show, that the women are complicated and not perfect:

“The show was established on the foundation of a screw-up, specifically Lorelai getting pregnant at 16. But built into that foundation was the very clear idea that people learn by making bad decisions and that just because something seems wrong at time the doesn’t mean that it isn’t a valuable step in taking you where you were always supposed to go. And even though the show established from the very first episode that Lorelai was prone to impulsive, sometimes self-defeating, behavior and that Rory was capable of the same choices, it never ceased to frustrate us. And even though we knew early on that both Lorelai and Rory had, to put it kindly, questionable taste in men, that fact didn’t lessen the gnashing of teeth and pulling of hair. We wanted these two women to be happy, even though they were hard-wired to complicate things for themselves. No matter how aware we might have been of their ingrained predilections, that knowledge wasn’t going to make it less painful when Lorelai and Rory fought or were estranged. That discomfort was required so that we earned the warm fuzzies when the inevitable reconciliations came. “

The Canadian Press also picked Gilmore Girls as one of the best of the 00’s shows, calling it the “ultimate comfort food television” due to its “unanimously quirky, lovingly drawn characters.” While the dialogue and Stars Hollow wackiness may not be “realistic,” they still love the show for its “slow-burning focus on the frustrations and joys of everyday life.”

Image: The WB