Tara Ward looks back on 12 months spent in the comforting fictional world of Stars Hollow.
It took my daughters and I over a year to watch all 157 episodes of Gilmore Girls. We stumbled across the show late in the summer of 2025, desperately searching to find something to watch together that appealed to everyone from preteen to perimenopausal parent. Every show we tried was either too old, too young, too violent, too slow or too sexy, and as we watched Rory and Lorelai Gilmore drink their first cup of coffee in Luke’s Diner, I realised there was a lot resting on this. If Gilmore Girls didn’t grab all three of us quickly, we were back to rewatching Nailed It! for the nine millionth time.
We made it through the first episode, and then the second. By episode three, we were officially hooked. The cosy American drama about independent single mother Lorelai and her high-achieving daughter Rory debuted on TV screens in 2000, but 25 years later it still had a vibrant, dynamic spark to it, thanks to its rapid-fire dialogue and flawed heroines who were as smart as they were funny. Gilmore Girls follows Rory and Lorelai’s lives in the quirky fictional New England town of Stars Hollow, as Rory finishes high school and heads off to Harvard and Lorelai rebuilds her relationship with her estranged wealthy parents, who she ditched when she found herself pregnant as a teen. It ran for seven seasons until 2007, with a four-episode Netflix revival in 2016.
By the end of season one, watching Gilmore Girls had become a family ritual. Sometimes we’d squeeze in an episode at the end of a busy day, other times we’d enjoy a decadent multi-episode marathon on a rainy Sunday afternoon. We couldn’t get enough of Miss Patty’s gossipy ways or the wacky antics of loveable village idiot Kirk, and wondered how 16-year-old Rory could handle guzzling so much coffee. The show’s 2000s soundtrack made me nostalgic for life before cellphones and social media, while my daughters drooled over Lorelai’s Y2K wardrobe of cropped cardigans and shoulder handbags. In between Rory’s teen love affairs and Lorelai and Sookie’s business chaos, I reminisced about faxes and phone books and tried to explain ancient pop culture references about NSync and Flo-Jo and someone called Hilary Clinton.
When the real-life news bought us horrific tales of genocide, war and climate devastation, we escaped to Stars Hollow, where the worst thing to happen was Luke getting attacked by a swan. We sped through the first few seasons, thrilled to always have something so comforting to return to. There were times when we wavered – season six was a slog – but even when we needed a break from Rory’s brattiness or Lorelai’s self-sabotaging ways, we would still find ourselves talking about the complex relationships between the three generations of Gilmore women, or Rory’s struggles at college, or how many weird festivals one small town could really have.
At the start of season seven, we realised we had reached the beginning of the end. We began to savour the few episodes we had left, rationing them out over days and weeks so we could prolong saying goodbye to the community of eccentric characters who had filled our house with all their funny, frustrating ways. Gilmore Girls became a treat, a gentle reward for making it through another tough day, a chance sit quietly with each other. It was an anchor point in our lives, grounding us together when the going got tough.
We never ran out of episodes – until, finally, we did. Netflix’s 2016 revival took the Gilmores to some ridiculous places (Rory had a boyfriend she kept forgetting about? Please) but we still didn’t want episode 157 to end. Over all these months, this wholesome, silly, charming American drama that was made what seems like a million years ago about mothers and daughters on the other side of the world had unexpectedly bought us together, over and over again. It reminded me how good it is to watch a story unfold over time, letting it slowly, deliberately, sink into our lives, and that television isn’t always something to be swallowed whole, a product to binge ferociously simply so you can move to the next delicious course.
Once the credits had rolled on that final episode, my daughter picked up the remote and went straight back to the start of season one. We sat on the couch and fell back into the comforting world of Stars Hollow, sitting side by side for one more episode. Maybe in the end, it wasn’t about Gilmore Girls at all.
Gilmore Girls is available to stream on multiple platforms.
