The Gilmore Girls’ Inclusivity Problem

It’s okay to love a thing. It’s better to love it when you see all its flaws.

Yi Shun Lai
ZORA
Published in
8 min readJan 29, 2023

--

An image of the characters Rory Gilmore and her mother, Lorelai Gilmore, from the show “Gilmore Girls.” They are both white women with longish brown hair and blue eyes. Rory on the left is wearing a red coat and her hair pulled back from her forehead. Lorelai is wearing a camel coat and a necklace and has her hair swept back. They are smiling at something to the left off-camera.
Image credit: Screenrant.com

(You can listen to me read this post to you here.)

(Here’s the much-shorter TikTok version of this post. )

In the early 2000s, Lorelai Gilmore came roaring onto the small screen in a jeep, and comedy was never quite the same for me. A lot on the show I didn’t find funny, because it was just too close to my real life for me to appreciate the absurdism, and then someone I knew fairly well told me I talked a lot like the characters on the show, and then I was simultaneously horrified that my inner thought processes were just out there like that and annoyed that I wasn’t writing for TV, since I apparently was already writing TV script.

Back then, I only watched three or four episodes.

I’ve been thinking a lot about mothers and daughters lately, so I thought I’d give this another go.

I am at the beginning of season 7 now, and there’s a lot I like about the show — and I’m looking forward to Netflix’s reboot, Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, so I can see how all those characters turned out.

--

--

ZORA
ZORA

Published in ZORA

A publication from Medium that centers the stories, poetry, essays and thoughts of women of color.

Yi Shun Lai
Yi Shun Lai

Written by Yi Shun Lai

Author: A SUFFRAGISTS’S GUIDE TO THE ANTARCTIC (2024), Pin Ups (2020). Former columnist, The Writer. theGooddirt.org Psst: Say “yeeshun.” You can do it!

Responses (14)