Coffee at Luke's: An Unauthorized Gilmore Girls Gabfest (Smart Pop Series)

Taking the Red Pill
Seven Seasons of Buffy
Five Seasons of Angel
What Would Sipowicz Do?
Stepping through the Stargate
The Anthology at the End of the Universe
Finding Serenity
The War of the Worlds
Alias Assumed
Navigating the Golden Compass
Farscape Forever!
Flirting with Pride and Prejudice
Revisiting Narnia
Totally Charmed
King Kong Is Back!
Mapping the World of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice
The Unauthorized X-Men
The Man from Krypton
Welcome to Wisteria Lane
Star Wars on Trial
The Battle for Azeroth
Boarding the Enterprise
Getting Lost
James Bond in the 21
^stCentury
So Say We All
Investigating CSI
Literary Cash
Webslinger
Halo Effect
Neptune Noir

Introduction

Speaking of the Gilmore Girls . . .

W
ELCOME TO
COFFEE AT LUKE’S
, a collection of people talking about
Gilmore Girls
, which is
so
appropriate. The success of
Gilmore Girls
can be attributed to many things: the beauty and charm of its protagonists, Lorelai the mother we all wish we’d had (or been), and Rory the daughter we all wish we’d been (or had); the warm and quirky charm of Stars Hollow, the community where nobody is ever lost or alone; the slow-burn sizzle of the romance between Lorelai and Luke, now gone horribly awry but still a winner for six long seasons; the parade of Rory’s boyfriends, each more attractive and impossible than the last; the anyone-can-relate Friday night disasters of dinner with Emily and Richard; and the crackle of the supporting cast, especially the acerbic Paris (who takes antisocial disorder to new heights), Kirk (who makes cluelessness an art form), and Miss Patty (who embraces life to the point of smothering it in her bosom). Even Paul Anka the dog has his own dysfunctional charm. Yes, all of these aspects contribute to making
Gilmore Girls
a TiVo staple, but the real draw that’s kept viewers coming back season after season? Oh, that’s the talk.

Yep, it’s the whip-fast, quip-smart, sassy patter that Lorelai dishes out and Rory bats back like some kind of party game for smarty pants, the Cool Girls verbal Twister, pitched right at us so we all can play. All teleplays have dialogue but very few of them use it well, and none of them rely on it the way that
Gilmore Girls
does: almost to the point of being a talking heads show, with very little physical comedy and fairy tale sets that function as a backdrop for beautiful people adept at delivering complex speech at the speed of light. Crafting that speech is a tightrope act the writers walk every week, and they walk it pretty damn well, in part, I think, because they keep in mind the basic rules for great dialogue:

Keep it moving.

Boy, do they. Well, they have to. On a typical television show, one page of script equals one minute of show and the average television script is about fifty to fifty-five pages (leaving room to cut the filmed results to forty-eight minutes of running time), but the
Gilmore Girls
scripts run seventy-seven to seventy-eight pages. That means no dawdling, so the characters rattle off the line like escapees from
His Girl Friday.
Call it
Our Girls Tuesday
, the screwball fastball of comic repartee that’s not only swift but complex, often overlapping not only conversations but also conflicts:

RORY: Hey. My mom’s not wearing any underwear.

LORELAI: Oh!

RORY: Well you aren’t.

TAYLOR: You’re just being selfish, Luke.

LORELAI: Still they don’t notice. I can’t take it anymore.

TAYLOR: We’re talking about the spirit of fall.

LORELAI: (gets the coffee herself and lifts the cover off the muffins) What kind of muffin do you want?

RORY: Blueberry.

LUKE: You know where you can stick the spirit of fall? (hands Lorelai a utensil to pick up the muffins) Here, don’t use your hands.

TAYLOR: I don’t think you’re taking me seriously.

LUKE: What gave you that idea? (to Lorelai, who is leaving) No tip?

LORELAI: Oh, yeah, here’s a tip . . . serve your customers.

LUKE: Here’s another . . . don’t sit on any cold benches. (“Kiss and Tell,” 1-7)

It takes very good writers to put dialogue like that on the page and keep it not only clear but entertaining while moving the story along. If you took the character tags off those lines and read it, you’d still know what show it came from because dialogue like that only happens in Stars Hollow.

Give everybody the best lines.

How can the writers do that? When characters are so distinct that they can’t possibly talk alike, the best lines for them can only be theirs. There are several television writers who are well-known for their dialogue, but too many of them fall into the trap of everybody-sounds-the-same. This rarely happens on
Gilmore Girls
where you can pretty much tell without tags who says, “This festival is commemorating the founding of our town, young lady” (“Star-Crossed Lovers and Other Strangers,” 1-16). Or who says, “You know, it’s times like these that you realize what is truly important in your life. I’m so glad I had all that sex” (“Say Goodnight, Gracie,” 3-20). Or who says, “Look, I’ve had my peace with the fact that everyone who calls here is a notch above brain dead, and that the pennies I am thrown each week are in exchange for me dealing with these people in a nonviolent manner, and usually that is fine, but today, sorry lady, I have ennui” (“Love, Daisies, and Troubadours,” 1-21). Or, God help him, who says, “Well, ladies and gentlemen, much like the Israelites of Yore, the Stars Hollow Minutemen languished in the desert for forty years. But tonight, there was no Promised Land, no New Canaan, only a humiliating five to one defeat at the merciless hands of the West Hartford Wildcats. So it’s back to the desert for the Minutemen, perhaps for another forty years. Of course, by then, I’ll be seventy years old. A lot of the rest of you will probably be dead. Taylor, you’ll be dead. Babette, Miss Patty . . . that man there in the hat” (“Face-Off,” 3-15). Even the walk-on parts are worth listening to because even they have places they’ve been and places they’re going to, full and fascinating lives, pieces of which they let drop into the story like seasoning. Everybody gets the best lines.

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