‘Gilmore Girls’ Weather Approaches: A Review Of The Complete Series Set

Back when the fall TV season used to mean something, before streaming meant new shows crop up all year round instead of premiering around the same time in September, now would be about the time we could expect a new season of Gilmore Girls. Of course, it’s even worse than that: CW originals don’t even exist anymore (which is what Gilmore Girls became, after starting on the WB). Still, fall weather feels like Gilmore Girls weather, so what better time to crack open Warner Brothers’ recent complete series set of the show on Blu-ray?

While Gilmore Girls had been available on DVD before, Blu-ray marks a new frontier for the show, and it is nice to see the upgrade. There are no new bonus features, and the packaging itself could be described as a downgrade. Those big plastic cases Warner Brothers seems committed to lately for complete series sets are for the birds. Getting discs out of them isn’t easy. Limiting the color scheme to blue is also a boring development. In the old days, the discs used to have images of the cast members on them. Here, each season’s discs are technically a different shade of blue, but some of them are so similar it’s hard to tell. While the episodes are listed on the inside cover, the booklets with episode descriptions and pop culture reference guides are gone. Also, the main menu on all of the discs uses the same photo of Lorelai and Rory from the box art. Still, since there is no option to pick up the seasons individually, this complete series set is the only choice fans have to get the show on Blu-ray.

In the same way The Office‘s popularity has kind of caused it to feel passé (even though it’s as funny as ever — it just didn’t used to be as mainstream), the commercialisation of Gilmore Girls and the abundance of products made targeting fans of the show has made it easy to want to dismiss the series or forget why it’s beloved. Turn on an episode, though, and the quotability of Amy Sherman-Palladino‘s dialogue comes flooding back. Stars Hollow nostalgia is real, and the series holds up, even if certain characters might register differently now than they did before (the signs that Rory would succumb to her worst spoiled instincts are there much earlier than season five, for instance).

At the center of the series is the mother-daughter relationship between Lorelai (Lauren Graham) and Rory Gilmore (Alexis Bledel). Having had Rory as a teenager, Lorelai’s relationship with her wealthy parents (Kelly Bishop and the late Edward Herrmann) has only gotten more strained, with Lorelai instead choosing to find support from the members of her eccentric New England small town. Running for seven seasons, this complete series set also includes the four-episode reunion season, A Year in the Life, that came out on Netflix in 2016 (the original series ended in 2007). At the time, I remember thinking this season was a bust because of how poorly it painted Rory out to be and the series’ warped understanding of what it means to be a professional writer. Allegedly great writers, for instance, don’t fall asleep in the middle of interviews (that’s just insulting) and creating a new love interest for Rory just for her to treat him awfully isn’t funny — it’s awful, but there is some good, classic writing mixed with the bad, and it isn’t the better off skipping event I remember it as being. It’s worth revisiting.

Gilmore Girls: The Complete Series is on sale now from Warner Brothers and can be purchased from Movie Zyng. Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life is also available as a standalone release.