The New 'Gilmore Girls' Clip Reveals A Lot

We're just two days away from the Gilmore Girls revival, and yet the good folks at Netflix are keeping us well hydrated on our Gilmore Girls waiting-marathon, keeping us topped up with tantalizing little sips of the show even on our final lap. Supporting cast members Scott Patterson (Luke), Liza Weil (Paris), and Sean Gunn (Kirk) appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon Tuesday night, and, after their short and sweet interview, they premiered a new clip. But what does the new Gilmore Girls revival clip tell us?

On first watch, it's no big deal. It's a sweet one-minute scene showing the citizens of Stars Hollow gathering for a film night at the art-house cinema. Kirk's girlfriend Lulu ushers Luke and Lorelai into a seat that they quickly realize is the last seat they want to be in, and Kirk introduces the David Lynch movie, Eraserhead. Yeah, and? Yeah, everything. Everything important you need to know is neatly packaged in this ostensibly unremarkable video, which is probably why Netflix only dropped it on the week of the revival's debut. For a start, there's the little matter of who's hanging out with who: Luke and Lorelai are spending Saturday night together.

Since Lorelai always had tons of friends, presumably that means our coffee-fuelled lovebirds are together. Oh, and, according to Lulu, she and Kirk are getting hot n' heavy on loveseats, so presumably they're still an item. Kirk's still doing what he always did, getting overly invested in the movies he presents and dressing up in the style of the film. Oh, and Stars Hollow's cinema is still playing cute quirky movies like Eraserhead rather than anything more contemporary. Despite the "cult" in cult classic being fairly emphatic for something as out there as Eraserhead, the whole town's there to watch that and not, more realistically, the latest Marvel movie.

Yeah, and? And — nothing's changed. This matters. When there's a time jump of nine years, you never know how a showrunner will handle it. Will they account for the time that's passed and show a setting that has changed in some way a la Battlestar Galactica's Season 3 one year leap? Or will they rely on the willing suspension of disbelief that's such a big part of the entertainment industry to suggest that the world of the show is timeless? The above clip suggests Amy Sherman-Palladino has settled for the latter.

This is fair. The show always had an insulated quality and, while political references were made, very few of them were current to the time the show came out — the key exception to this rule being, of course, Rory being invited to join Obama's campaign bus. It's consistent to the ethos of the show that, while so many of us are watching Marvel movies in multiplex cinemas, that this wouldn't necessarily be captured on screen in Stars Hollow. After all, a revival centers on one key emotion: nostalgia.

So snaps to Amy Sherman-Palladino for knowing that we don't want to see a reflection of the contemporary world around us; we want to see the same Stars Hollow we've always known and loved, complete with a thriving arthouse cinema that, despite that famous statistic on cinemas surviving on the food they sell, seems to be doing perfectly fine even with everyone bringing their own snacks. Realism's overrated — long live the Gilmore Girls.

Images: Netflix (2); The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon/Youtube