Fundamentally women without men

I don't watch The Gilmore Girls*, but the woman who wrote this article gets it. Completely. Selections:

... that was the charm of the old show: women, fundamentally women without men, were compelled to talk as fast as they could to keep their loneliness at bay. The virtue of (the) style was that it created characters who were new to television. (...) Lorelai and Rory shared the witty woman’s challenge: to architect a wall of words so high and so thick that no silence, no stares, no intimations of mortality or even love could penetrate it. And the more they did that season after season, and the more they relented only when overcome by real despair, the more (the creators) seemed to have found a way to bring the pain of cleverness to the screen.

Lorelai’s out-of-touchness with her own emotional life has only grown more extreme. That process has had an incredible poignancy and even suspense. Lorelai’s internal life — her desperate loneliness (come on, have any of these forgettable guys even come close to matching her?) coupled with her untenable reliance on her daughter as the one true thing in her existence — is clear to longtime viewers. But no one of her fans would really want her to face that suffering, and turn soft. To force some kind of psychological reckoning on her would be sadistic. Her humor, her style, her neuroses, even her quicksilver physicality were all contrivances that served to shut out existential truths.

If she were in therapy, or a character on a show with a dumber audience, maybe she would have to embrace her weakness. But like Elizabeth in Stephen Frears’s movie “The Queen,” Lorelai has a humanity that is perfectly apparent precisely in her unwillingness to betray her stoicism in favor of a therapeutic catharsis. For all these years, Lorelai in “Gilmore Girls” has been painful and surprising and exciting to watch — a marvelous high-wire act. How cruel that the new writer of the show wants to rub her face in conventionality, strip her of the speed that was her reason for being and transform her into another banal television lead.

*OK, I dabbled heavily last year, but that was a combination of the formidable influence of Trivial Kate - she can even get me to watch game shows! - and the excellent writing.