I’ll admit I’m fairly (as in very) behind the curve on this one given that all seven (seven!) seasons of the Gilmore Girls have been and, thankfully, gone. I must defend my ignorance and related tardiness by pointing out that I’m a bloke and, therefore, hardly the target market for this ‘wacky’ comedy.

Nonetheless, a quick Google search suggests that there is bizarrely little criticism of this show so, presumably because most people have enough self-preservation sense to change the channel after five seconds of watching. In order to square that circle and purely just to vent, here goes…

My exposure to the Gilmore Girls was totally accidental, it turns out my girlfriend loves the show and watches it constantly. Having moved in together, that means I have to love the show and watch it constantly. Well, not quite. But still it’s on enough of the time to grate.

As far as I can tell the show revolves around the adventures of a woman in her late twenties who is actually in her mid-late thirties and her twelve year old daughter who is actually like nineteen or something. Because the mother looks so young its clear that the producers have had to go out of their way to find the youngest looking actress they could for the role of the daughter and it is bizarrely off-putting to see her make wisecracks about Proust and Nick Cave with her creepy twelve-year-old voice.

The main theme of the show is the relationship between the mother and daughter and as such is a genuine all-girl love-in. Men, such as they are, are either semi-comic buffoons (without any decent jokes) or obvious scumbags who only serve as a distraction for the main interplay between mother and daughter.

One of the key strands of the back story is that mother had daughter at the age of sixteen (a handy excuse to avoid hiring an older actress) and raised her quote ‘single-handedly’ unquote. Despite this the mother has managed to work her way up to a hotel manager. That’s right, smart and sexy!

I think that the audience is supposed to sympathise with this whole single mum scenario but in truth she is the most unlikely single mum ever. She never seems to work, despite apparently having a job. Oh, and her parents are really rich. As in, whoops we just bought an apartment in New York by accident rich. I might be wrong but I find it hard to believe that any real single mum could find this anything other than incredibly patronising.

Aside from the main characters, the show is populated with irritating, ‘wacky’ side-show characters doing ludicrous stuff. All the time. The worst of these are the ‘small-town’ yokels who seem to be in the show purely so the sophisticated main characters can make in-joke, pop-culture-referencing quips that then fly totally over their unsophisticated yokel heads. As irritating as these minor characters are, the fact that they have been written in purely as targets for the writers makes them weirdly sympathetic, and you keep rooting for them to put the lead characters in their place with a counter-quip of their own.

But my main gripe is not with the scenario or the characters but the way they talk. All of the characters talk at about 100mph and seem to not need to breathe. Ever.

Every scene in the Gilmore Girls is a breathless quip-fest, chock full of unfunny ‘jokes.’ No one ever stops to think or pass wind or scratch themselves or slap the other person in the face purely because the other person is so incredibly irritating.

I guarantee that if you ever met any of the Gilmore Girls in real life you’d have to make your excuses and leave after about a minute, mainly to avoid inflicting physical violence to their person.

I hope that this short article, as untimely as it is, rings a chord or two with a few other hapless guys (or girls) to whom this show is an unwanted affliction. If you love the Gilmore Girls please try not to throw anything too big my way…