Do We Care Too Much About Rory's Gilmore Girls Love Life With Dean, Jess and Logan?

Creator Amy Sherman-Palladino thinks there's too much attention on Rory's past beaus

By Chris Harnick Nov 04, 2016 6:00 PMTags
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Team Jess! Team Logan! Team Dean! Team…wait, do we care too much about Rory's love life on Gilmore Girls? The show's creator, Amy Sherman-Palladino, thinks so.

In an interview with Time, Sherman-Palladino, who wrote and directed the four parts of Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life with her husband Daniel Palladino, said the love interests are just a "small part of who Rory is."

"Rory didn't spend her days thinking, ‘Who am I going to end up with?' Rory was much more concerned about ‘How do I get that interview at the New York Times?' It's a natural thing: People love romance," Sherman-Palladino said, noting romance is an element of basically every TV show, even anti-hero dramas like Breaking Bad.

However, she said sometimes she did wish "that the Dean and Jess thing weren't so prominent because in the grand scheme of Rory's life."

"I don't begrudge people the excitement of Jess and Dean. But they were there to show Rory's evolution as a character. She picked certain boys for her depending on who she was at that moment," she said. "It was part of her character. It was part of her development that Dean was her first boyfriend, that Jess was the boy that diverted her attention. Then she wound up with Logan, and God knows where she's been since then."

That doesn't mean she doesn't have great affection for Milo Ventimiglia, Jared Padalecki and Matt Czuchry, the real men behind Rory's men.

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"They were a very big part of the show, and frankly they were always there to feed stories about Lorelai and Rory," she said. "That was the core of everything. Lorelai's relationships, Rory's relationships were a way for us to explore the mother-daughter relationship."

So please, think about Rory in other terms besides who she has dated.

"Everybody should go back and think about their boyfriend at 16 and then reevaluate whether that should be the focus of the conversation," Sherman-Palladino said.

Czuchry, Ventimiglia and Padalecki all make appearances in the Gilmore Girls revival. The Netflix event series picks up roughly 10 years after viewers last saw Lorelai (Lauren Graham) and Rory (Alexis Bledel). Lorelai is with Luke (Scott Patterson) and the Dragonfly Inn is still going strong, but Rory is a little lost, looking for her place in the world. And then there's Emily (Kelly Bishop) who is now a widow after the death of Richard (Edward Herrmann, who passed away in 2014). Also making appearances in the new installments are Sean Gunn, Keiko Agena, Liza Weil, Danny Strong, Melissa McCarthy and Yanic Truesdale, to name a few.

Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life premieres Friday, Nov. 25 on Netflix.