Disc 1 of the First Season Gilmore Girls DVD set is both one of my favorites and one of my most hated. It’s one of my favorites because I remember the first time I got to watch these episodes. It was after I had seen many episodes in seasons 3 and 4. And I finally got a chance to see the whole story, from the beginning.
Many TV shows, in their first episodes, they get started slowly. It takes them several episodes, even a whole first season, to find their voice. Gilmore Girls took no time at all to find its voice. Yes, in these first episodes, we’re missing many of the minor characters. And not-Kirk appears twice. And Lorelai talks about taking a car down to “Muskie’s.” I guess Gypsy hadn’t moved in yet? And even Luke wasn’t yet quite Luke. And the cinematography and lighting is different than what we see in later episodes.
But even from the Pilot episode, the Gilmore quality was there. Many details about Star’s Hollow were yet to be refined. But the witty banter, the engaging storylines, the life-like characters, the laughter, the drama, the pop-culture references… They were all there, right from the very first episode. Sarah Metz told the story in the Frederick News-Post of how she became a Gilmore Girls evangelist:
“Just watch the first episode,” I’d say. “If you don’t like it after the first episode, we don’t have to watch anymore.”
It never came to that. No one could resist the magic.
And on Amazon, the First Season (as I write this) is rated by 318 people, with an average rating of 5 out of 5 stars. And if you read the reviews of the few people who rated it poorly, you see they complain about the DVD quality, not the quality of the story itself.
Unfortunately, this is also why the first DVD is one of my personally most hated. Because it introduces us to the characters and conflicts that are going to carry us through the first three seasons.
In the Pilot episode, we meet all the primary and secondary characters for the first time. We discover that Lorelai and Sookie have a shared dream, to start an inn. Rory gets into Chilton, and she meets Dean. And the conflict between these two is what ultimately drives the episode. And Lorelai goes to her parents for money to pay for Rory’s school, which begins the weekly Friday-night dinners, which quickly divide Rory and Lorelai and then turn into a hurtful shouting match between Lorelai and her parents.
And then everything really goes downhill. In “The Lorelais’ First Day at Chilton,” Rory learns that Chilton is overwhelming. And to top it off, she gets to meet Paris and Tristan. Meanwhile, Lorelai starts her day by oversleeping, not being able to pick up her laundry, and going to meet Headmaster Charleston wearing a T-shirt and jean shorts… where she finds Emily, ready to make her life impossible.
Then comes “Kill Me Now,” in which Emily strong-arms Rory and Richard into going golfing together. And when the afternoon actually goes well, Lorelai’s jealousy threatens to drive a wedge between her and her daughter. All these conflicts are there to introduce us to the characters and their relationships. But conflict is also there to drive the story forward. And that’s why the first disc is full of conflict, long-term conflict. Because the long-term conflicts established in the beginning are what drives the story forward through to the end of season 3.
And the last episode on this disc, “The Deer-Hunters,” also fulfills that goal. This is one of my most hated (and most loved) episodes. I love it, because it so powerfully tells its story. Rory gets a D on an English paper, something that has never happened to her before. And of course, Paris is there to belittle her and make her feel like an inadequate little cockroach. So Rory and Lorelai stay up late studying for the important English test. And as a result, they oversleep, and Rory ends up being late for the test. Unfortunately, that means she isn’t allowed to take the test. She melts down and throws a fit in Mr. Medina’s classroom, and then Lorelai is called in, who also melts down and throws a fit in Headmaster Charleston’s office. This is also the episode in which Lorelai meets Max Medina, and she clearly likes him, and he likes her. But she ends up furious at him and hurt by him, because he enforced the rule that Rory was disallowed from taking the English test. The big win for the girls was that the ordeal finally ended, and they could go home and lick their wounds, and Rory could decide whether or not to quit Chilton and give Paris the satisfaction of being right in her loathsome nastiness.
Beautiful, ain’t it?
I hate this episode, because I hate to see my favorite characters undergo such tribulation. I hate to see them beat down, and just when they start to get back up on their feet, beat down again, harder. Sometimes, when I watch “The Deer-Hunters,” I fast-forward over the really painful parts.
But that’s what happens at the beginning of a story. The hero of the story is beat down, and then beat down again, harder. Because that’s what keeps you watching. And Gilmore Girls is a story. As I said, these first episodes pave the way for the first three seasons. So Rory decides to stick with Chilton, and Max pulls some strings and makes it possible for Rory to do some extra-credit work to try to bring up her grade. But it’s not easy extra-credit work. It promises to be hard enough to make what’s already happened look like a cakewalk.
For all of its angst, the first disc does contain some classic moments:
And there are some moments that are really satisfying after having watched all first three seasons. Like Paris boasting that she is going to be Valedictorian, and warning Rory not to get in her way, or else. It puts a whole new spin on things to know how things actually turn out.
The best part about the first disc, of course, is it makes you want to stick in the second disc.
-TimK