What 'Gilmore Girls' Made Me Finally Realize

The TV show recently celebrated its 25th anniversary.

By

Lorraine Duffy Merkl

 
Published February 12, 2026

In fall 2000, I was a 39-year-old Manhattan mother of a three-year-old girl, Meg, when a new TV show entered the zeitgeist and became the phenomenon known as Gilmore Girls.

It was quickly THE mother-daughter show to watch and Meg and I jumped on the bandwagon; our no-boys-allowed viewing meant my husband Neil and then seven-year-old son Luke knew to steer clear of the TV on Thursdays.

We, in fact, watched all seven seasons and in 2016, when the miniseries Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life aired, we buttered up the popcorn for that, too.

During all those years, I loved having what Meg called “our show.” While I related to the plot because, like Rory (Alexis Bledel), I was raised by a single mother, I had little in common with Lorelai Gilmore (Lauren Graham), aside from both of us having a daughter.

She was a single 32-year-old raising her child, the product of a teen pregnancy, in Stars Hollow, Connecticut, a fictional town you’d find inside a snow globe. Lorelai had grown up affluent with parents from whom she’d distanced herself for the past 16 years. After the strip on the home pregnancy test stick turned pink, Lorelai ran away, became a maid at an inn, and worked her way up to manager.

I, in contrast, had a successful attorney husband and a second child. Unlike many New York City moms, I didn’t have a nanny because my mother lived across the street from me, having moved from our middle-class outer borough of the Bronx, where I’d grown up. I worked from home as a freelance writer.

Despite these dissimilarities and the fact that I had evolved into a very competent mother, I wanted to emulate Lorelai, who was a Cool Mom. Fun Mom. BFF Mom. She had a free-spirit vibe I’d never known.

I couldn’t help but think, “Thank goodness the apple fell far from the tree,” upon the onscreen arrival of her estranged mother, Emily (Kelly Bishop). I immediately understood why Lorelai had left home. Even though Emily’s well-appointed mansion, replete with a staff, looked like something out of an Architectural Digest spread, she was introduced as distant, disgruntled and disapproving.

I swallowed hard along with Lorelai when she had to go hat in hand to her mother to request financial help to send Rory to Chilton, a prestigious private high school, increasing her chances of entering the Ivy League. Lorelai and I rolled our eyes simultaneously when, in exchange for Rory’s tuition, Emily wanted her daughter and granddaughter to come for Friday night dinners.

As Gilmore Girls celebrated its 25th anniversary last October, I’m still a disciple of the show, but my allegiance has changed. I’m now around the age that Emily Gilmore was when the show aired, and I understand that the eldest “Girl” was the one upon whom I should have been modeling my mothering.

Although Lorelai still has her charms, I now listen to her witty comebacks and cringe at how smug and childishly smart-alecky they sound. I see a grown woman who errs on the side of immature, incapable of controlling her emotions and unable to keep whatever pops in her head from falling out of her mouth.

In contrast, Emily is savvy, poised and possesses impressive leadership skills. As Bishop told a writer from Salon while promoting her memoir The Third Gilmore Girl, “[Emily] was just fun to play. She was strong and didn't worry about hurting people's feelings; she's going to say what she means and try to get what she wants.”

What Emily wanted was a good life for her family.

I stand by my assessment that Lorelai embodies cool and is a good parent to Rory. However, after Lorelai explained defensively to Emily that she’d built a life on her own with no help from anyone, I now side with the older, more traditional Gilmore who replied, “Yes, and think where you’d have been if you’d accepted a little help?”

When our daughter Meg was a teenager, she rebelled in the most benign ways, but the struggle was still real.

Having a pregnant teen, as Emily did, who’d rather leave home to raise her child among strangers when her mother could have provided comfortable surroundings and childcare so Lorelai could finish high school and perhaps go to college, is enough to cause heartbreak. No wonder Emily was so stoic. If she’d ever opened the door to her emotions, she probably wouldn’t have been able to stop crying.

Like Emily, I too know the frustration of having a headstrong daughter eschew advice and opportunities to do things her way, making easy situations difficult. It’s very sad to watch your child make a mistake that could have been avoided if she’d just learned from yours.

With Emily back in their lives, Lorelai and Rory benefitted from the matriarch’s “interference,” aka wisdom, connections and style, whether it was her arranging a cocktail party to introduce Rory to upscale people or suggesting that she attend the Debutante’s Ball, a wonderful evening where the youngest Gilmore reconnected with her father, Christopher.

She ended up paying for her Yale education and taking Rory in and getting her a job when the coed needed a mental health break from college, throwing Rory an elegant 21st birthday party and offering to buy Lorelai and Luke a house as their wedding gift.

Finally, in the third episode of the last season, “Lorelai’s First Cotillion,” the then 40-year-old had a reckoning: She’d always done things not because she wanted to do them but because her parents didn’t want her to.

This oppositional behavior cost Lorelai the life she was watching Rory live, and denied herself a satisfying mother-daughter relationship.

It took me 25 years to realize that, as endearing, self-advocating and fun-loving as Lorelai was, Emily, with her directness, generosity, social grace and ability to take charge, was the mother to be — and, I’d like to believe, the one I eventually became.

Lorraine Duffy Merkl is a journalist in NYC and the author of three novels, the latest titled “The Last Single Woman in New York City.”