The Second Sex: Gilmore Girls

A few American TV series have ended forever. They stretched cultural boundaries. They even announced the arrival of Quality Television. TV shows that could make movies seem short and badly told. Suddenly television actors were looking better than movie stars - Suddenly, each episode seemed like cinema worth running home for.

America’s TV heroines started to speak more and in a way that could lure in excessive audiences. One show that made pop cultural history was the infamous Sex and the city. Using sexual language like no women in TV had ever done before, the characters empowered Feminism. However within the stereotypes of each leading lady, one thing became clear…she would only be truly happy when she found a man. If language was pushing things forward, the story lines were not.

The OC replaced Dawson’s Creek as America’s window into "thinking" teenagers lives. Beautiful, rich, tortured and pseudo reflective teenagers shared their intimate thoughts with the youth of the world. When the series finally ended, as seems characteristic of most series finales these days(in that, the writers can finally do all the things they wanted,)the writers injected a rake of comic intellectual dialogue and the final episodes had a John Hughes quality, a far cry from the whiney existencialism of Dawson and Joey.

Meanwhile, one series emerged that dumbfounded us all. A mother and daughter in a perfect small East coast American town, where New York style dialouge and neurosis made the characters and story lines glisten. The Gilmore Girls were showing another type of woman. What was considered “Dawson Speak” was now elevated to a whole new plane of multi-referenced dialogue, where thousands of words would be uttered in one sentence. Wit, humour and endless self conciousness would all be piled up into a mountain of meaning delivered like rusty Shakespeare.

Some people might have been over-whelmed by these “talking women” and their male equivalents, but for the most part this has been one of the most successful TV shows in the last ten years. Without having to resort to trendy or shocking story lines the women in this fictional world entertained us by emptying their heads and quitely moving on with life. A self-made working mother and a private school/Yale educated daughter, who battle with feeling satisfied in modern relationships and modern living.

Mostly community spirit is celebrated in this TV show coupled with the portrayal of honest and naturalistic relationships. The Gilmore Girls showed women who talk, think and live. No real conclusions were given at the end of the show. Love seems as transient as happiness and self-fulfillment. At last a series that showed the inconclusive nature of modern womanhood. The Second Sex is coming first on American Television.