(Gilmore Girls fan site)
Still watching Gilmore Girls
and still loving it

You have to understand, I am of Lorelai’s generation. The Love Boat was on TV while I was coming of age, and so despite the cheesy theme song, dumb jokes, sometimes half-baked story lines, the show still holds a special place in my memory.

When Luke mentioned that he and Nicole were going on a cruise, Lorelai’s reaction was completely natural: “You don’t [have any plans to get married], but after you’ve had dinner at Captain Stubing’s table and Isaac’s served you up a couple of mojitos…” For many of my generation, The Love Boat imbued the pleasure cruise with romance and inspired our affection for it. The Love Boat represents life-changing passion and heartfelt human-to-human connection.

Now that Paramount has begun releasing the episodes on DVD—they’re 1½ seasons through a 9-year original run—I’ve been devouring them as quickly as they’re being released. I’ve noticed several similarities between this television classic and my favorite show of all time:

• People. The Love Boat is not about romance as much as it’s about people. Yes, the show has romantic story lines, just as Gilmore Girls does. But also like Gilmore Girls, in the broader romance tradition, it also tells stories about parents and children, about first loves, about family loyalty, about failing and restored marriages.

• Dramedy. Long before the term “dramedy” had entered the popular venacular, The Love Boat was combining character-driven drama with rapid-fire wisecracks… and a laugh track! (Okay, so Gilmore Girls doesn’t have a laugh track—thank God!) Back then, the combination of drama and funny was called “romantic comedy,” and The Love Boat managed to do it well enough to keep the show on the air for 9 years plus.

• Characters. Like Gilmore Girls, The Love Boat sported a cast of three-dimensional, sometimes off-beat characters. Remember, however, that The Love Boat was not a serial drama. That is, each story line was contained in a single episode, and there were several stories to be told in each episode. Yes, occasionally there were double-length episodes. Even so, there were no epic story lines, as we see in Gilmore Girls, that stretched across seasons (e.g., Rory getting into Yale, or Lorelai starting her own business). This is important, because it’s very hard to develop rich characters in short stories. Yet, most of the characters that appeared on The Love Boat appeared in only one story line in only one episode, and still they managed to capture our attention, drag us into their plight, and wrench our hearts. As a writer myself, let me assure you, that’s quite an amazing feat to accomplish in such a limited space.

These are no doubt some of the characteristics that cause me to enjoy both of these shows as much as I do, and that set them apart from what else is on TV.

What do you think? What other favorite shows of yours are kinda-sorta like Gilmore Girls?