I Watched This Beloved 2000s Show To Prove It Was Toxic. I Was Shocked By What It Revealed About My Closest Relationships.

There are three kinds of mothers in “Gilmore Girls” — the cool mom, the mean mom and the mean immigrant mom.

Nobody wants to be the mean mom or the mean immigrant mom. Heck, nobody wants to dress like them either. St. John’s knits, pearls and heels a la Emily Gilmore? No, thank you. Double no thank you to Mrs. Kim’s wardrobe, whatever that blue lab coat over a buttoned-all-the-way-to-the-top blouse and modest skirt situation even is.

Way before I knew who Lorelei Gilmore was, I dressed in the cool mom uniform: low-rise jeans, shrunken tees, floaty dresses, skinny scarves. It was the early aughts, and all the cool moms at my daughter’s elementary school dressed that way. Way before I watched Lorelei and Rory exchange zingers over coffee at Luke’s Diner like they were at some kind of Wisecrack Olympics, I knew I was going to be my daughter’s best friend and she was going to be mine.

By the time I arrived in Stars Hollow — in fall 2025, because I like to be fashionably late to cultural milestones — I knew better. If I’m being honest, I started watching “Gilmore Girls” to prove a cynical thesis: that the show was saccharine and reductive, that it celebrated teen motherhood without acknowledging its costs, that Rory (Alexis Bledel) and Lorelei (Lauren Graham) were a case study for toxic enmeshment. That, above all, there was no universe in which a mother and a daughter could be best friends.