Binging a television show during quarantine is a subtle art. The show’s characters need to have an interesting enough life to keep you engaged and give you an escape from your current predicament. While they and their situation must be interesting, it can’t be too exotic, interesting, or enviable, otherwise you risk rendering too palpable the difference between the television show and your life stuck at home.

Those guidelines will keep you within a range of television shows that are comforting, but you need one more crucial filter to find a bingeable show while stuck in your home. That is, the show must have stakes high enough to build tension but not so high that you burn out your attention with one or two episodes.

Only a few shows available on the major streaming services thread this needle. Of those, I have recently been watching through, Gilmore Girls might be the best of the group.

The Girls of Gilmore

Before beginning an analysis of why it is perhaps the best, readily available binge TV, let’s get a synopsis out of the way. How does it work? Why does it work?

Gilmore is essentially a wish fulfillment fantasy of a near perfect mother-daughter relationship. The two main characters Lorelai and Rory are a symbiotic dyad, as much best friends as parent and child. Their bond is deep and good natured and genuinely loving. That bond alone wouldn’t make for great storytelling, so it is contrasted with the mother-daughter relationship between Lorelai and her mother Emily, a cold and controlling woman obsessed with the expectations and mores of high society.

That is all to say that the majority of the show is an examination of intra-female communication. There are boyfriends, potential boyfriends, fathers, and male townies who populate the show as well, but the major characters and connections are all female.

That female-based generational drama is further exacerbated through a class dynamic that runs through the show. Lorelai left the world of her wealthy parents, but daughter Rory — being a privately educated, Ivy League bound teenager — has no need to rebel against her grandparents. That closing of the loop (the granddaughter bridging the family schism between the grandmother and mother) causes conflict and context for much of the show.

The class elements make for smooth going. The problems are by and large non-problems. An entire episode is devoted to Rory’s struggle over which college to attend: Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. Lorelai’s origin story is one of a brave rich girl deciding not to be rich. While one could wax Marxian about the ideological effects of encouraging people to sympathize with the bourgeoisie, one can’t say it makes the show bad binging fodder. Returning to the earlier point of not-too-high-but-not-too-low stakes, rich people’s non-trauma based family drama is perfect to hit that note.

After all, we all have families, so we can sympathize with not getting along with our uptight mother or trying to support your well meaning teen through the hard times of adolescence. But the absence of real life-or-death consequences keeps the lid on dangers that might blow out our attention.

Brand New Nostalgia

Gilmore evokes a unique form of nostalgia at this moment. The show was never much of a ratings smash, but it did very well for the second-tier broadcast network the WB (for the show’s last season, the WB reshuffled into the CW). That means most of us weren’t watching it weekly on its first run.

That being said, Gilmore was sent into syndication in 2004, after its third season. And so it became part of the general background noise of daytime and early evening TV in the nearly two decades since.

Gilmore’s mixture of nostalgic familiarity pairs nicely with its season long (and longer) arcs, which most viewers have never examined. So there is this strange feeling when watching the show — it has the comfort of nostalgia with the shimmering newness of something you’ve never seen.

And beyond that strange pairing, the nostalgia it deals in is the latest kind: nostalgia for the naughties.

Ending a relatively brief ten years ago, the naughties are unmined nostalgic territory and are still a ways off from the much upheld 30 year nostalgia cycle. That means Gilmore doesn’t lay in that fatigued pile of the over-sampled, over-referenced pop culture group of the current nostalgia trend (today it seems to be sliding from the eighties to the nineties).

The nostalgia doesn’t end there. As a show focused on the milestones of childhood and parenting, the content is built out of the things everyone can find something to be nostalgic about. To go one step further, the show is set in the sleepy New England town Stars Hollow. Stars Hollow sprouted from the mind of show creator Amy Sherman-Palladino when she visited a similarly sleepy Connecticut town and experienced such overwhelming nostalgia that she pitched the show entirely on the setting. This show is an onion of nostalgic layers, and that onion-like quality is the only reason it makes me cry.

Smart and Funny, but not Overly So

Gilmore is notable for the cracking wise protagonists who chatter incessantly in bubbly repartee in a whimsical small town filled with other clever talking, unbelievably good looking people. At its worst, the characters appear like narcissists who are psychopathically entertaining themselves by running spontaneous monologues. But that is at its worst. For the most part, it hums along with relative ease — just enough references and kind-of-funny-jokes to keep your ears leaning in.

Much like the level of stakes mentioned earlier, dialogue that is frequently hilarious and razor sharp would not be bingeable. It would be satiating. Great TV rides the line between fulfilling and vapid, compelling and boring. It’s middle seat viewing: you’re not laid back as you fall asleep or sitting on the edge. Neither is sustainable.

So it must be noted here, this is not an insult to the show. I’m not saying that it isn’t as smart or funny as the writers think it is. I’m saying that the writers were working on a television show, and that requires a certain kind of writing.

What We Binge

As I continue to watch copious amounts of Gilmore, I ask myself what it is I’m consuming. Why is it so comforting, especially now when in lockdown?

Of course, a major component is the simulation of social connection, of living a life. Without the regular activities that define us, we sit at home drowning in an ego that has nothing to boost it, comfort it, confirm it. It is a feeling of coming apart. While yogis and gurus have long taught us to transcend the ego, no one said that we should dive into the practice of its annihilation without any warning or preparation.

And so, we need to do something to give us a feeling of social reality.

But that only explains viewing in quarantine. What begins to open up in us is the horror of all the viewing we did before we were confined to our houses. Before the lockdowns, we were already sinking into confinement. We were already feeling the need to reach out to comforting media. Think about it: even when we were free to travel and cavort and socialize in large groups, we were already binging television shows.

In that way, Gilmore is not only a view into the needs of our current life in these extreme circumstances — it is a view into what needs we weren’t fulfilling before.

While other forms of escapist media involve danger, excitement, explosions, violence, and other kinds of far out living, Gilmore provides something else. It provides a cozy experience where turbulence, for the most part, comes in the form of everyday inconvenience and miscommunication. It shows us the dream of a life of general comfort, living in a community we know and love and that knows and loves us, being in a perfect relationship with our child or mother — it’s the idyll of being nice people living nice lives.

The enduring popularity of Gilmore is evidence that these humble fantasies are unrealized in us. That we binged this content even before quarantine points to a profound lack of nurturing in our society. We watch Gilmore because we don’t live in Stars Hollow, because we don’t connect fully to our family, because we don’t know the nice life. The question transforms from asking what comfort Gilmore Girls gives us, to why we need its comfort in the first place.