I remember reading at the time, when I was there and the show was running, that Season 4 was under much criticism for the show not working without Rory and Lorelai living together, and that the Luke-Lorelai romance gave them a burst of high scoring with audiences.

Taking these quotes all together, one does wonder if Amy Palladino did not want to have several breakups and a believable reunion and future for the characters and did it for a season of stories, and had some bittersweet idea about the girls staying together always despite breakups with men as her overall story idea.

She told a national press junket she didn’t believe in the break-up-to-make-up stuff on other TV series, and was also not promising that Luke and Lorelai would end up together:

From the wires (this one from the Deseret Morning News, Feb 2005):

“While the producer promises that the Luke-and-Lorelai relationship won’t devolve into a break-up-to-make-up cycle , that doesn’t mean there won’t be challenges. Like in Tuesday’s 100th episode of the series (7 p.m., Ch. 30), when Christopher, the father of Lorelai’s daughter, gets between the two. And Sherman-Palladino isn’t promising that the new relationship will last forever.

“Luke and Lorelai could split up over many reasons that wouldn’t be Christopher,” she said. “Luke and Lorelai are very independent people who have built very, very separate lives. Part of the interesting thing about getting them together was not just that they would make a handsome couple, which they do, but it’s the fact that you’ve got this woman who’s done it all her whole life by herself. . . . You’ve got a man who’s done the same thing. And both of them have their lives the way they like it.

“When you’ve got two people who try to mesh those two lives, that conflict is going to come.”

* * * *

And when she said she had planned it and definitely anticipated a love-connection, she also said she thought she could get “a season of stories” out of it. This is what she told Time Magazine (Feb 2005):

We had this Luke-and-Lorelai thing in our back pocket; it was just a matter of when we wanted to do it. We were like, “Do we just take them to a kiss?” But I was like, “That’s bulls—. We can’t have them kiss and say it was a mistake.” The fear was we’d put them together and all of a sudden it’s “You’re pretty,” “No, you’re pretty,” and there’s no conflict anymore. But I thought if you just keep Luke and Lorelai [like] Luke and Lorelai, there will still be conflict. Once I saw a season of stories I said, “What are we waiting for?”

* * * *

So is it a surprise she barely got a year of a happy relationship out of the two of them?

And when she promised there would be reasons other than Christopher to break up the relationship, you have to wonder if she had April in mind then, but as you say, Ryan, it should have been a lot more of what she promised — about Luke and Lorelai’s baggage.

As for the no break-up-to-make-up cycle, well, she broke them up, got them together, broke them up… so what can we really take out of what she said?

Well I think they did set it up that way, if you go back to the first five seasons. They just never followed through. The idea that a woman like Lorelai who gave up her career to raise a child and whose future is on the rise, courted to go around the world, would want to settled down forever and start popping out babies in a small town while the most important person in the world to her is traveling around the world as a foreign correspondent is hard to take. The more logical arc for this AMAZING woman is to finally be the world-traveler that she was destined to be, doing what she does best, and able to meet up with her daughter in exciting places around the world (As if Stars Hollow is all there is? Come on.) And if a guy she’s fallen for wants to be “buried in that diner” as Sookie said — there’s yours setup for the incompatibility. Once the Durham Group storyline got dropped and Rory’s foreign correspondent future was substantively thrown out, there went the essentials … hey, maybe it was the Palladinos’ writing skills after all!

Of course, as Lauren said in one of her last interviews about the film, the problem with the idea is people really don’t go back after bad breakups (two of them). And I know if my fiance slept with someone she can’t seem to get over while we were engaged, I don’t think most people could ever get over that.

http://www.gilmoregirls.org/news/355.html

(Read the last paragraph) Apparently getting Luke and Lorelai together was in the plan which isn’t surprising since it made sense with the feel of the show (good point on that one Isha). I mean, seriously, anyone watching the show knew that was in the plan and I really give Palladino alot of credit for not letting them get together for four whole seasons. I mean, what other show does that!?

On a different note, EVERY other show finds some contrived reason to break up the show’s power couple for the sake of keeping viewers pissy and watching which unfortunately Gilmore Girls did as well. I personally think it would have been more in line with the show’s feel to just let Lorelai and Luke stay together after the Season 4 finale and watched them realistically deal with what happens after you find your “happily ever after” instead of adding in some random kid as a plot device to break them up. Or at least they should have made the break up more realistic because both of the characters (especially Lorelai) had more than enough emotional baggage to warrant a realistic break.

Well, maybe it’s not ASP’s writing inadequacies that reflect her inability to pull of a Casablanca, but, as you say, the expectations of the viewers. People who love that film, or The Way We Were, are not happy with the endings. That’s the point. I think they just get it and aren’t expecting TV to satisfy all of their fantasies, and are more appreciative not only for the enjoyment of the rest of the story that got them to the bittersweet or sad ending, but whatever story the writer was trying to tell. And even when the writers of those stories were not doing morality plays, people take lessons from them and try to make the happy endings in their own lives. (I know at least a few people who have said they broke up with some people because they didn’t want to date a Hubbell!)

As much as Amy and Dan always said they didn’t want morals to their stories, they did show Jess being broken and learning from his mistakes and apparently wanted him to come back, probably for more of that storyline. (I think Milo just didn’t want to go back and made this clear.) So maybe they would have given Rory-Jess fans that ending.

But I think Amy DID have it in her to finish the story with Luke and Lorelai broken up. First and foremost, the show is about the “Gilmore Girls”, Lorelai and Rory. I think that’s what the show celebrates is even when other relationships fail, when you have a good parent-child relationship, that can give you enough joy. Sure that “season of infamy” didn’t reflect well on the Palladinos writing skills, but I’d like to think they had it in them.

As someone said on another post somewhere (mcityrk? isha? marie? help me out), if you look at the movies that Amy highlighted in the series that she considers perfect, like Casablanca and The Way We Were, the two leads did not end up together. And as was said elsewhere, she didn’t promise they would end up together when Season 5 started. And look what she did in Season 5 and 6: Amy had Luke and Lorelai break up twice, the first based on an overreaction, and the second time in a way that shows real lack of regard for each other’s feelings at best. And at worst, makes it look, as Arieanna suggests in this post, that they do these kind of things to get to each other (Luke dating Nicole to make Lorelai jealous? Lorelai sleeping with Chris while engaged to Luke just because she could do it, and then to tell Luke about it to make a point?)

If that’s what people are saying, or rationalizing as romantic, do we really think this kind of behavior is how two people we admire should behave, or do we think these are just two “flawed” people who use others just deserve each other? I think as Ryan and Marie say, Luke dated Nicole because he wanted to, and when given a chance, could be a good boyfriend. (And maybe Lorelai slept with Chris for the same reason, because she wanted him.). It may spoil some people’s fantasies, but it makes them less manipulative and mean as characters.