Like many of us, Lauren Graham doesn't remember much about Season 7 of Gilmore Girls. In Graham's memoir, Talking As Fast I Can: From Gilmore Girls To Gilmore Girls (And Everything In Between), she goes into some detail about the problems she had with the show's original final Amy Sherman-Palladino-less season. She says that season was part of a "tough year and sort of a jumble for me memory-wise." In fact, Graham totally forgot that Lorelai got married to Christopher at all. But what she does remember from that time is that how the cast found out about the series ending leaves a bad taste in her mouth — specifically when it comes to how Ed Herrmann found out.
The original final episode of the series, "Bon Voyage," was filmed before anyone actually knew if the show was coming back. Graham claims that she said a brief goodbye to everyone that night, and, in the coming weeks, there was discussion of whether the show would come back for a full season, a shorter one, or not at all. The latter was obviously the decision they came to, and it's one Graham learned of while out to dinner with a friend. Her agent called to tell her, but told her not to tell anyone else.
Graham assumed everyone was getting this terrible call, but she reveals that it was actually only her and Alexis Bledel who were given this courtesy. Others, as she notes, were told in "far less conventional ways," including Herrmann.
Graham claims that Herrmann "learned the show was cancelled from the clerk at a video store in Connecticut." Maybe because we all know him as Richard, who would not stand for such buffoonery, but, if true, this seems extremely sad. Thankfully, though, it seems this alleged event didn't effect the way he thought about the show. In a 2009 interview for an unauthorized book about the making of Gilmore Girls, Herrmann talked about the changes his characters made over the seasons, explaining that for him it was
...this relationship between the grandfather and the granddaughter blossom. Which was very hard on the daughter to see – this unaffected affection being expressed between her father and her daughter. That was a lovely dynamic element in the show that I really enjoyed.
It was something his own daughters enjoyed. While he didn't talk about his own feelings on the finale, besides noting, like everyone else, that it didn't have much of an ending, he remembered his daughter crying over the finale.
When I asked the trouble, she said “It’s OVER. It just is OVER and nothing is settled! Does she marry Luke? What HAPPENS? You guys have to get together and make the ending. Can’t you just make a movie about it?” The explanation that the series didn’t belong to us didn’t mollify her. It still hasn’t. I have the feeling millions of kids (and mothers!) feel the same way.
For him, the end was never something that belonged to him, which is maybe why he never spoke about how he found out that it was over. Maybe reportedly hearing from a fan of the show felt about right for him.
Graham says now she would have handled it differently. "If I had to do it all over again, I'd have called everyone myself," she wrote. "And thrown a party, too." This certainly sounds like a very Lorelai thing to do. And having the chance to reconvene and say goodbye one last time with Gilmore Girls: A Year In The Life seems very fitting for this onscreen family.
Image: Warner Bros. Television; Giphy (2)
