Times When 'The Gilmore Girls' Is the Literal Worst

The Gilmore Girls is a lot of things to a lot of people. It is a happy, cozy show about familial closeness and the prettiness of New England weather. It is about friendships carrying you through hard times and helping you achieve your goals. It is a show about a mother and daughter, quirky and funny, and the life they lead among small-town nuttiness. It is, indisputably, a great show, much beloved, and worthy of a million rewatches.

But the curse of the rewatch is that sometimes things pop out at you that are so cringe-inducing it becomes harder and harder to forgive. Because while all of those good things about The Gilmore Girls are true, it’s also a show about people who can be critical, mean, horrible to each other and downright petty.

Weight Shaming

One of the nice things about the original series is how it handles overweight women. Sookie’s weight is never presented as an issue. She is talented, sweet, funny, supportive, and is the subject of one of the series’ best romantic plotlines. Babbette is half of one of the most stable marriages in the show (and bonus points for being happily childfree). Ms. Patty is a large woman always on the prowl for a new husband in her very Elizabeth Taylor pattern of marriages. None of these women are mocked or ridiculed for their size, and none of them are seen as lesser or undeserving as a result of it.

That said, weight shaming is still around. When Emily Gilmore tore into Shira Huntzberger, one of the first things she mocked her for was her weight fluctuation—a taunt that was commended by the rest of the Gilmore family. Rory compares an overweight ballerina to a hippo in an article for the school newspaper and later says another student has fat thighs. Emily says that if a person needs a little more room to navigate around a chair, they need to be on a treadmill and not at a party. During the revival, Lorelai and Rory spend considerable time by the pool being disgusted by overweight people who dared to turn up in bathing suits.

There is nothing redeemable in this, and their horrifying way of devaluing people for their weight is a real problem in a society where weight shaming leads to horrible negative consequences like being underpaid in the workplace. When you factor in the fact that Lorelai and Rory eat everything under the sun and shun physical activity, it’s even worse, and potentially promotes eating disorders.

Communication? What Communication?

Lorelai and Luke are the absolute worst couple when it comes to communication. Every major problem in their relationship comes straight from not being able to talk about the hard stuff. She should be able to tell Luke that Christopher’s father passed away and she needed to spend time with him. He should have been able to tell her about April. They hide things from each other and nearly implode their relationship over and over again about the lack of communication.

This is a problem Rory picks up in her relationships too; she thinks it’s better to cheat on Logan than to discuss with him her continued discomfort over his dating while they were separated. And even though they brag about the closeness of their relationship, even Lorelai and Rory can’t talk about the big stuff without dissolving into fighting. It’s not that close a relationship if you can’t lean on each other during the hardest, most confusing times, or give guidance that’s hard to hear (or accept said advice when it comes from a place of love).

Rory Is a Cheater

Putting aside the awfulness of the barely-a-triangle Paul/Logan thing in the revival, Rory doesn’t have the best track record when it comes to monogamy—specifically, other people’s. Though she does kiss Jess in the season two finale while still dating Dean, you can almost excuse that away by saying she was young, confused, and in a situation she was unprepared for. You can even use that excuse when she pitches a fit because Jess doesn’t wait patiently for her over the break (wanting her cake and eating it too, party of one). But she sleeps with Dean when he’s married, sleeps with Logan when he’s engaged, and tries to sleep with Jess to get back at Logan.

As an aside, how gross is that? Jess is supposed to be her friend at this point, who goes to her to show her how he’s made himself a better person, and her response it to use him to get even with Logan? Ew.

Cap it off with the fact that, years later, in the revival, she’s learned absolutely nothing about making dangerous, and, let’s be honest, reprehensible decisions about sex. She doesn’t follow safe sex guidelines—she has unprotected sex, one night stands, and sleeps with people who have other partners. This is risk behavior for STDs, and frankly it’s astonishing that she doesn’t have one (or at least a cadre of spurned exes who loathe her for ruining their relationships by sleeping with their significant others).

Rory Is Not Special

Is she smart? Yes. So are a lot of people. Does she work hard? Sometimes. And hard work is always commendable. But Rory has a horrible habit of thinking of herself as special, and utterly melting down when confronted by the idea that she just might not be. At her core, Rory is privileged. She has opportunities other people would kill for, and that’s okay. But she mistakes her privilege for being special, and that is not true.

Towards the beginning of the series, we see Rory work hard at school. She’s thrown into a higher tier of difficulty and has to bust her butt to catch up. Once she’s caught up, though, showing her working hard and struggling to obtain her good grades just stops. Paris freaks out over her grades. Madeline and Louise struggle from time to time. We see Paris put in an insane amount of work over the high school years. But Rory never really seems to struggle. She dedicates time to studying and school activities, sure. But everything appears to come easy to her.

When she goes to Yale, the adjustment hits her again, and we see Rory collapse into tears over not being naturally good at it. College can be a hard adjustment for sure, but this pattern repeats itself. She resorts to bribery to get a good study spot with just the right atmosphere. And while a good study environment is important, she’s so distressed that the spot she wants is taken she has to pay someone to give her what she wants? When Mitchum criticizes her, she resorts to felony theft. When Lorelai tries to keep her going, she runs away. She doesn’t know how to handle it whenever she needs to work hard, because she is given most everything she wants.

The revival shows us the natural extension of this; Rory can’t survive in the modern world of journalism because the legwork and dedication required is staggering. She expects to be handed a job and then have praise heaped on her. She goes to interviews completely unprepared because she just expects she’ll get the gig.

Casual Homophobia

I know what you’re thinking—whoa there, one of Lorelai’s best friends is gay. And while Michel didn’t come out until the revival (and even then we never got to meet his partner despite being one of the main characters in the entire show), he certainly pinged the gaydar for watchers over the years. This doesn’t stop Lorelai from making some uncomfortable remarks. When Kirk is carrying around Lulu’s dog in a purse-like carrier she makes fun of his “gay bag.” Lorelai says that two people of the same sex kissing looks funny. Luke angrily shouts he’s not “poofy.” Jason calls waltzing “a little gay.”

If you don’t count Michel (because he wasn’t confirmed as gay and frequently talked about dating women), the original series has no gay characters. None. That’s mind boggling.

Teenage Sex Is Punished

Let’s look at the first sexual experience of the three main teenage girls in the show. Paris sleeps with her boyfriend, whom she loves, then gets rejected from her dream school and calls herself a slut. Lorelai later sings to herself that her daughter—still a virgin—is the “good kid.” Rory loses her virginity to her ex-boyfriend whom she claims to love (but let’s be honest, she really just loves that he loves her. Rory is all about cultivating the feeling of being adored), but he’s married, and she ends up destroying that marriage. Lane sleeps with her husband on their honeymoon, it’s a terrible experience, and she ends up pregnant with twins.

That’s… overwhelming. There’s not one positive experience among the three of them. While losing your virginity can be tricky for teenage girls, the show teaches us that teenage sex always leads to bad things. Unless, of course, you’re Madeline and Louise. In that case, it just makes you a slut.

For a show that features overwhelming positivity and support between the main characters, it’s a mystery why such toxic behavior exists. Calling it out is tough love, but it needs to be said. Now let's go back to watching “The Bracebridge Dinner” and forget any of this ugliness exists.