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I started watching Gilmore Girls because I needed an anesthetic—and a way to get my 10-year-old ready for bed. For years, books have been our thing: Anne of Green Gables, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, enough Percy Jackson that I’d come to regret it.

But I host a daily news podcast. When Donald Trump got reelected, I craved a break. My daughter was already heavily invested in Doctor Who with her dad and weekend rebroadcasts of SNL with the rest of us. So starting in January, the two of us checked into the Independence Inn together, Monday through Friday.

I imagined Gilmore Girls as a way to unlock my naive “innie.” As soon as the nostalgic strains of Carole King’s “Where You Lead” kicked off, I felt like Mark S. in the elevator at Lumon, shrugging off the news of the day and plunging down the sanitized corridors of Stars Hollow.

But this didn’t work out so great in Severance, and it didn’t work out so great for me, either. Soon I realized: Stars Hollow would never be my escape from 2025 America. Instead, it offers the road map for how we got here.

For the uninitiated, the premise of Gilmore Girls: Thirtysomething Lorelai Gilmore lives in small-town Connecticut with her daughter, Rory, and manages a small hotel. Lorelai’s all but cut off ties with her own (very wealthy) parents, who remain deeply ashamed that their only kid wound up pregnant at 16. When young Rory, who has dreams of Harvard, is admitted to the tony Chilton School, Lorelai swallows her pride and asks her parents to foot the bill. The weekly dinners Lorelai’s mother extracts as repayment form the backbone of each episode.

Lorelai and Rory are the beating heart of the series, a mother-daughter pair who call themselves best friends. They navigate the world like a Disney reboot of Thelma & Louise.

The show premiered in 2000, when Destiny’s Child was on the radio and Hillary Clinton was about to be elected to the Senate. Watching those early episodes now feels a little like cueing up some Sarah........

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