Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Gilmore Girls for Foodies

Lots of food in last nite's GG ep ("'S Wonderful, 'S Marvelous") but none of it excited me. It felt like the writers were trying to include the basic elements of the GG formula but without integrating them into an organic whole, without making them expressions of character in the context of the situation. There was a bit with Lorelai expressing her distaste for squash soup, calling the squash festooned around the Dragonfly kitchen gourds and being illogically disdainful. This was the opportunity for Sookie to squeal that the soup tastes like pie, at which point we were supposed to exclaim, aw that Sookie's cute! Nah. This also functioned as one way to indicate the passage of time. In the previous episode it was still early summer; now it's back-to-school season. Another way they established this was by having Lorelai and Chris go to see Snakes on a Plane. But it didn't quite add up in my mind. Snakes was an August release and squash are at the earliest a September crop. A show that is so concerned with the characters' interactions with movies and eating needs to get these things spot on.

The opening scene had Lorelai and Chris divvying up their movie theater candy. Sour Patch Kids, Twizzlers, Milk Duds. This seemed perfunctory. A scene at Luke's had Kirk struggling to decide between a bagel and pancakes, somehow a metaphor for whether Luke would try to please his girl or his mom. I barely understood this and didn't care. Unless he is being obnoxious as he plies some novel trade, I am not interested in Kirk.

In non-food scenes, the strongest material was the scene in which April, Luke's daughter, plugs the virtues of shopping at Target. The comic bit with him thinking "Tarzhay" would be too fancy for them was good clueless Luke humor. The scene with Rory making new friends, two artsy girls she meets at an opening she is covering for the Daily News, had some amusing bits at the expense of contemporary art. But these were easy points to score and not terribly imaginative ones. I was happy to see a veteran of Veronica Mars, Krysten Ritter, who played the mayor's daughter Gia, as one of these characters and I look forward to seeing more of her in coming weeks. The scenes around Emily getting arrested and bailed out of jail were strong but her über-haughty response to being pulled over were a bit too sitcom. On that note, the author of this week's script, Gayle Abrams, is a vet of Frasier and other half-hour laffers.

Elsewhere in the world of television-food connections: tell me you don't want these Battlestar Galactica cakes for your next bd party.

2 Comments:

Blogger Reel Fanatic said...

I enjoyed the two art chicks that Rory brought home from the show, but I have to be wondering that story line might be going ... could be interesting, I think .. my favorite moment so far has been Lane's description of sex on the beach .. disgusting, but priceless

6:01 PM  
Blogger md said...

I have to say, I think the writers have been reading my diary re: Rory. I am so glad to see her making actual new friends. Only took her until her senior year. But this is what girls do. And I'm glad that she is going to put wild red streaks in her hair. They made Rory into such a priss. This Rory is way more convincing than that other rory-robot. At least, compared to the Rory who went to see the bangles and knew the words to random clash songs off the top of her head.

5:19 PM  

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