"Where You Lead" (Carole King, from the LP Tapestry)

(note- this post is also cross-posted on the slowly-but-surely resurrecting Saturday Night Rewritten Isthmus, which features some comedy writers a hell of a lot more clever than me. perhaps you should check that out too...the link is that funny underlined text, yo.)

Unemployment does funny things to you. Once you get over the sheer awesomosity of sleeping however long you want and doing whatever the hell you want to some extent, the joy quickly falls out of it, you (or to be honest, me/I) crawl to a slow pace on the jobs you apply for and do 'em half-assed, you and your, er, delivery service get way too familar. Perhaps this in turn helps to lead you to start watching 6 hours of TV a day, on the worst days.

(Oh, Time Warner Cable, thanks for saving me and Matthew a little money on the package deal, but damn you for bringing VH1 Classic into my life once again. If I were to ever get TiVo, no one would ever hear from me again.)

And there's one funny as in ha-ha funny thing unemployment (which, thank God, I'm out of at least through May) did for me. It got me into a show I'm not sure men admit to watching, and definitely don't much do. It got me into motherfucking Gilmore Girls. Seriously.

Look, considering how many men are watching The O.C., a straight-up teen soap opera scattered with not especially good "indie" music (again I ask...what does this term mean but "more popular and well-known in New York than anywhere else"? and how is that a genre?), I could probably defend my old habit of watching reruns regarding the all-too-unreal adventures of Lorelai and Rory Gilmore straight, no chaser...

...but then, there is the question of the femininity of the show: male characters are either unrealistically accepting of everything these gals throw at them, bizarre comic relief, or singing songs all the time. (There's a town troubador in this show, who seems to get paid to sing something that matches whatever just happened. Yeah, it's that unreal.)

It all takes place in a absolute fantasia, Stars Hollow, CT (apparently this show is filmed on an old studio lot from some old 50s flick too), the ladies eat junk food, do not work out, and yet are nicely shaped and look fine as sweet premium wine, everything always works out even when the dramedy nature leaves you on some good old-fashioned "what'll happen next" shit. What am I, heterosexual male, doing watching this shit? Well, let's try to figure it.

1) Set in Connecticut.

Ten years of my life were spent there, 4 in my beloved New Haven, 6 of my younger years in Westport (hold your gagging, I'm with you on that most of the way...and ain't never going back to the suburbs). The state is in most ways a by-way between Boston and New York, but ol' Nutmeg is nevertheless a home for me, if not my home now. Rory later goes to Yale too.

2) The dialogue, the dialogue.

Kinda ridiculous, fairly well-parodied in an episode of Family Guy (a show not normally my cup of Wild Turkey), but also waaaay too much like how I talk. A sample I'll just make up right now:

LORELAI
Oh my God, you didn't show up to the party. Are you Mildred Piercing me?

RORY
Perhaps I'm caught in Mommie Dearest.

LORELAI
Oh, God, am I going to have to go home and cry and listen to Sea Change over and over again?

RORY
Bon Jovi Wordsworth Chaucer The Strokes Hurricane Katrina Final Destination 3!

LORELAI
The Kinks Dorothy Parker!

LUKE
(Mumbles something, acts curmudgeonly, buys flowers and chocolates and sugar and spice and everything nice.)

This dialogue is also delivered at the speed of light. Gilmore Girls has more pages in their scripts apparently than any other hour-long show.

3) So maybe I want to live in a town made of magic where you can start your own inn with no problems and have a family you hate that nonetheless finances your daughter through an expensive prep school and Yale and blah blah blah.

4) Lauren Graham is fine as hell.

I mean, to quote the D'Angelo song, shit, damn, motherfucker.

(All of those are work-safe, but I am aware that the 3rd picture is just really, really sketchy, but I'm not doing that extensive a Google search here. I also am officially, for the moment, like 13 years old.)

(By the way, that other gal in the picture way above, Alexis Bledel, does little/nothing for me, for whatever reason. Could be the bizarrely clipped way she talks, could just be the creepy eyes [which are madly apparent in that picture])

5) I was high the first time I watched it. But I still watch the damn show sometimes.