Talking As Fast As I Can: From Gilmore Girls to Gilmore Girls, and Everything in Between.

Books At two hundred pages for £16.99 and a pretty large font size, the RRP on this memoir is a bit steep so I ordered a copy through the local library. After having read those two hundred pages, which are admittedly very content rich and read like a letter from an old friend, this still feels very expensive, so if I were you I'd wait for the paperback.  Unless you are desperate or rich or have a library which is happy to buy in this sort of thing.

Striking a good balance between her private life and career,  Lauren takes us on a tour of how she got into show business, some of her lesser known roles and retells the story of how she was cast in Gilmore Girls even though she was almost contracted for another series and Piers Brosnaned out of it.  Back stage gossip is minimal even in relation to the Pallidinos leaving the series with only mild barbs about what happened in season 7.

There's little darkness in here.  But that's all fine.  The last thing you'd want is to turn to these pages and find out that Graham is a nihilistic so-and-so who hates everyone.  Arguably the more interesting passages are when she's clearly paying lip service to her other work even though she knows much of the core readership for the book doesn't care.  The Parenthood chapter is very, very polite, all very, "Yeah, I did Parenthood for years but all you care about is Lorelei so ...."

"I first watched Gilmore Girls around the same time I first saw my mum cry ..."

TV Lovely profile of Gilmore Girls by Abigail Radnor in The Guardian:

"I first watched Gilmore Girls around the same time I first saw my mum cry. I was 21, newly returned to Manchester after a year spent studying at an American university, and I was, as my mum would say, “full of it”: overflowing with excitement and not shutting up. She was driving and I was in the passenger seat; I had just picked up a set of photographs of the best year of my life, and was using them as visual prompts to enthuse about the friends I had made, the places I had been, the ludicrous frat parties I had gone to. Mum was silent for the most part, until she burst into tears. I was dumbstruck. There is nothing more terrifying than seeing the strongest person you know overcome by sadness. Eventually she said, “I am just so jealous”, words I could never have imagined she would say."

I had wondered why, other than budget, the new series was four 90 minutes episodes. Turns out the Palladinos like Sherlock.

Where you lead, I will follow. To Netflix.

TV Find above the final official trailer for the Gilmore Girls revival which just looks astonishing. Some of the line readings are all over the place and there's bound to be a certain amount of patience required as wait for the actors to get a handle of their characters but damn. Six hours won't be enough. It won't be enough. Theory about Melissa McCarthy. She filmed a whole bunch of scenes on her work days so she's threaded through the whole thing. We'll see.

"That plant, that plant that people line up to see even though it smells like dead fish."

TV You will have seen the trailer for the Gilmore Girls revival. I would have posted it here already but it was everywhere. But just in case, or so you can watch it for the three hundred and twenty third time:



Not since The Sirens of Time ... anyway ... the key element which has been remarked upon script wise is how its designed to underscore that this is a story set in the now, referencing Amy Schumer and John Oliver. But mores to the point, in the middle of Lorelai's bit, Rory dives into her iPhone and searches for information about what the bad smelling plant is, which does feel weird if you've just ended a binge of all seven seasons and the last time you saw these characters Rory's grandpa was trying to find a decent wifi signal in his house by holding his laptop behind a plant, everyone had only just graduated to "burner" mobiles and people still used pagers.

Anyway, the point of me writing this about a coincidence.  Rory gets her answer, presumably from the wikipedia: "Corpse flower" and she does this on almost the same day that an example of the species is in a blooming cycle at New York’s botanical garden in the Bronx and sure enough Lorelei's quite correct. People have queued up to see this oddly beautiful monstrosity and The Guardian was there to find out if indeed it does smell like a dead fish:

"“It smells like lettuce when you take it out of the bag,” a woman yelled from the crowd of onlookers in the Enid A Haupt conservatory. “It smells like the aquarium. Like the penguin enclosure,” another added. The odor came in waves as onlookers jostled for the best spot to take photos and selfies with the giant flower. Some left holding their noses."