F-Rated: Gilmore gets Gunky

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The new fall season was ushered into reality this past week, with premieres galore freshening up our TV lineups. Some shows took their first step into a vicious, cancellation-prone prime-time, while others that we know and love returned to unravel yet another chapter in their history. There’s still a few weeks of premiere-fun to go, but these are the prime-time highlights I tuned into this week:

Monday: Heroes
Tuesday: Gilmore Girls
Wednesday: America’s Next Top Model
Thursday: Ugly Betty, Grey’s Anatomy

So what TV moment gets rated this week? Let me start off by saying the following.

Every good show gets in a funk sometimes. In the early seasons of a program’s run, this funk is usually part of an overarching TVelopmental process that allows writers to feel out what clicks and what to nix with their audiences. Many years into a show, however, program funks are inevitably signs of age.

I hate to say it, but this week’s Gilmore Girls premiere suffered from a self-induced ‘Gunk’. Starting off its sixth season on primetime without the whipper-snapping tongue-in-brain leadership of the Palladino pair that founded the series, Gilmore was excruciatingly drawn out and seemed to get lost in its own rampant bout of neverending communicado. It’s unfortunate really, for a series that was always able to master the talk with the walk– balancing banter with a good dose of drama and plot movement. This week, however, the plot took a step back, the walk turned kind of clumsy and the talk–well we couldn’t get it to stop. The story was looped around two main moments of the show–Logan’s departure and Luke’s supplication, both of which occurred succinctly at the beginning and the end. Minute-thirty on the other hand, struggled with a mid-show crisis of sorts. The belly of the show was forwarded by an endless bout of Rory-Lorelai scenes that revolved around the same ‘I miss Logan’, ‘I don’t want to talk about Luke’ whine-fest, but in different locations with different wardrobe. To cover up the repetition, the writer’s tried relentlessly to insert the usual doses of quirky humour (mom and daughter playing raquetball), which though funnier than most funny shows on TV, was thinned by its status as a front to cover up everything that was NOT happening.

And while we’re on the topic–when did Gilmore Girls become a show that revolved primarily around the downtrodden lives of two women who do nothing but harp on their relationship woes? Maybe it’s too early in the season to make such an acclamation, but for a show that boasts a female mantra in its title, you’d hope they’d have better things to occupy themselves with. And was it me, or did the actors seem a little too aware of their breathless discourse? An early reference to eachother as individuals who always ‘talk’ because ‘that’s what we do’, was not lost on anyone, and was just enough lack of subtext to pull me out of Stars Hollow and put me right back into the dreary-non-fictional world TV’s supposed to whisk audiences away from. Bledel’s performance in particular was tinged with overwrought self-awareness, almost to the point where her cutesy was becoming more of an actor’s annoying whim than character’s once-endearing mannerism.

Sadly, Gilmore’s gunk–not its spunk, dominated the hour this week, causing this viewer to launch into a frenzy of TV denial hoping the show hasn’t changed and the now AWOL status of the Palladino’s has nothing to do with it. According to the premiere however, they do, earning Gilmore this week’s underwhelming B-Rate prize: Been Better.

What’s F-Rated about? How do the F-Rates work? Read here.

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