Fast Talk, Slow Town

Stars Hollow is one of those fictional places that functions as a comfort object for the people who grew up with it. Small-town Connecticut, a mother and daughter who talk faster than anyone has any right to, a cast of supporting weirdos invented by someone who actually liked small-town life rather than condescending to it. Gilmore Girls ran from 2000 to 2007 and never quite left.

The Netflix revival brought Lorelai, Rory, and Sookie back roughly a decade later, and the reaction was immediate and total. What the show always did—and what made returning to it feel less like nostalgia than like picking up a book mid-chapter—is its speed. The dialogue is dense with cultural references: film, music, literature, whatever was in the news cycle that week. It treats the audience like adults who read things, which is both the show’s charm and the reason it holds up.

The generational friction between Lorelai and her mother Emily is written better than most drama that takes itself far more seriously. Rory’s arc from perfect-student golden girl to uncertain adult hit differently in 2016 than it might have earlier—there’s something in the gap between promise and outcome that aged into something more complicated. The Funko figures released alongside the revival—Lorelai, Rory, Sookie—are exactly what they should be: small, earnest, slightly ridiculous plastic monuments to a town that never existed and somehow still does.