Check out all our lists for BuddyTV's Top 7 of '07 to relive the best and the worst of the year in television.
Debbie Chang ranked Gilmore Girls 2nd. She says...
Gilmore Girls ended its seven-season run in the spring of 2007. The show's quality dipped precipitously in the sixth season, mostly due to the character assassination that Luke Danes (
Scott Patterson) suffered with regard to his long-lost daughter April. Lorelai (
Lauren Graham) also had the misfortune of losing her signature spunk, piling on more things for us viewers to complain about.
However, the seventh season of
Gilmore Girls was able to turn it around. Whether it was because of the change in leadership, when David Rosenthal took over the reigns after creator Amy Sherman-Palladino's departure, is not clear, but the characters became closer to what we had always known them to be. Perhaps not quite up to the level of the first three seasons, but it was enough to remind us of its previous greatness.
The latter half of the seventh season, beginning in January of 2007 began the deterioration of Lorelai's and Christopher's (David Sutcliffe) marriage, bringing order back to the universe. The show is supposed to be about how nontraditional family structures are sometimes the better choice than strictly adhering to the mommy-daddy-2.5 children rule, and having Lorelai marry Christopher, without even telling Rory (
Alexis Bledel) about it, was a huge affront to that.
The end of the series also brought to television some of the best musical moments of the year. At the memorial service of Michel's (
Yanic Truesdale) dog Chin Chin, Zach (Todd Lowe) played an unplugged version of Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On" that was sentimental and just ironic enough to be brilliant. Plus, there was Lorelai's karaoke debut, in which she sang "I Will Always Love You," first for her daughter, and then for Luke as he walked in. I gasped at the raw talent and pure emotion that Lauren Graham brought to her performance. As Zach said, "She sure has a set of lungs on her."
The season also brought Lane (
Keiko Agena) and Rory back together and actually acting like BFFs again. They even acknowledged that they hadn't been all that close these past couple of years. Female friendships, along with complicated mother-daughter relationships, are what make the show, and
Gilmore Girls brought Lane and Rory back for us this year.
I am not ashamed to admit that I openly wept during the entirety of the series finale, in which the twee town of Stars Hollow throws Rory a huge going-away party. Rory had just broken up with her long-time boyfriend Logan (
Matt Czuchry) because she could not commit to marriage with him quite yet. Lorelai just realized that Luke might be the one for her after all. And so the series ended, with each Gilmore girl making her way through life, feeling out her next move, one at a time. Likewise, we all must move on with our lives, without our Tuesday night girl-power fix.
(click here to read Debbie Chang's complete Top 7 list)
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