"Gilmore Girls" Greatest Hits - The Top 20 Episodes, Part 4: #16 - #20 and the best of the final seasons

So here’s something you may not know about me: There are few things I love on this good earth as much as Gilmore Girls. And with the A Year in the Life ‘reunion’ season debuting on Netflix this Friday, I’ll be spending the week sharing my thoughts on my Top 20 favorite episodes of the series. Why Top 20? Because when I tried to list just 10 I came up with so many more. Gilmore Girls was a qualitatively consistent show – most episodes are at least very good, and few, even during the show’s rougher patches, are obvious outliers one way or another. Normally, I would try ‘ranking’ a list like this, but I quickly found that to be a foolhardy task. I cannot name my favorite episode among these 20, nor can I easily say any of them are better or worse than one another. So instead, we’ll be revisiting these episodes chronologically, from the very beginning to the very end, in four articles, posting Monday through Thursday, featuring 5 episodes apiece. You can read Part 1 here, covering #1 – 5, Part 2 here, covering #6 – 10, and Part 3 here, covering #11 – 15.

So without further ado, let us conclude our journey with Part 4 of the Gilmore Girls Top 20 after the jump…

"Gilmore Girls" Greatest Hits - The Top 20 Episodes, Part 3: #11 - #15 and the best of Seasons 3 and 4

So here’s something you may not know about me: There are few things I love on this good earth as much as Gilmore Girls. And with the A Year in the Life ‘reunion’ season debuting on Netflix this Friday, I’ll be spending the week sharing my thoughts on my Top 20 favorite episodes of the series. Why Top 20? Because when I tried to list just 10 I came up with so many more. Gilmore Girls was a qualitatively consistent show – most episodes are at least very good, and few, even during the show’s rougher patches, are obvious outliers one way or another. Normally, I would try ‘ranking’ a list like this, but I quickly found that to be a foolhardy task. I cannot name my favorite episode among these 20, nor can I easily say any of them are better or worse than one another. So instead, we’ll be revisiting these episodes chronologically, from the very beginning to the very end, in four articles, posting Monday through Thursday, featuring 5 episodes apiece. You can read Part 1 here, covering #1 – 5, and Part 2 here, covering #6 – 10.

So without further ado, let us continue our journey with Part 3 of the Gilmore Girls Top 20 after the jump…

"Gilmore Girls" Greatest Hits - The Top 20 Episodes, Part 2: #6 - #10 and the best of the early years

So here’s something you may not know about me: There are few things I love on this good earth as much as Gilmore Girls. And with the A Year in the Life ‘reunion’ season debuting on Netflix this Friday, I’ll be spending the week sharing my thoughts on my Top 20 favorite episodes of the series. Why Top 20? Because when I tried to list just 10 I came up with so many more. Gilmore Girls was a qualitatively consistent show – most episodes are at least very good, and few, even during the show’s rougher patches, are obvious outliers one way or another. Normally, I would try ‘ranking’ a list like this, but I quickly found that to be a foolhardy task. I cannot name my favorite episode among these 20, nor can I easily say any of them are better or worse than one another. So instead, we’ll be revisiting these episodes chronologically, from the very beginning to the very end, in four articles, posting Monday through Thursday, featuring 5 episodes apiece. You can read Part 1 here, covering #1 – 5.

So without further ado, let us continue our journey with Part 2 of the Gilmore Girls Top 20 after the jump…

"Gilmore Girls" Greatest Hits - The Top 20 Episodes, Part 1: #1 - #5 and the best of Season 1

So here’s something you may not know about me: There are few things I love on this good earth as much as Gilmore Girls. It pretty much goes 1) my family, 2) my dog, 3) the gift of life, and then televisual trips to Stars Hollow.

OK, maybe that’s an exaggeration. But I’m one of the people who finally caught Gilmore Girls when it came to Netflix a few years ago, and discovering it there was like meeting the long-lost family I never knew existed, finding a language and a tonal wavelength that hit me right in the heart, on a practically chemical level. I have already watched the entire series start-to-finish twice, and I’m more excited for Netflix’s upcoming A Year in the Life revival than almost anything else this or any other year.

I love going to Stars Hollow. It’s easy to call this series ‘comfort food,’ as many do, but I think that undersells its achievement – that it’s not just comfort food, but smart comfort food, soulful comfort food, comfort food that is makes one feel at home because it develops complex characters in a wonderfully rich setting, a world that is fully fleshed-out, not free of conflict, nor strictly beholden to reality, but true and honest to itself and its worldview. It is perhaps the closest any live-action American TV series will ever come to having a town as fully inhabited and richly developed as Springfield on The Simpsons (Pawnee on Parks and Recreation would be an obvious #2), and the core character dynamics are so fundamentally strong and unique that the show could frequently build long, endlessly entertaining scenes out of the most mundane interactions (the most dramatic Gilmore Girls sequences are, more often than not, family dinners).

With A Year in the Life debuting on Netflix this Friday, I’ll be spending the week sharing my thoughts on my Top 20 favorite episodes of the series. Why Top 20? Because when I tried to list just 10 I came up with so many more (and because 20 is easily divisible by 4, the number of parts in which I’ll be publishing this list). Like Mad Men, which I also did a Top 20 'Greatest Hits' list for, Gilmore Girls was a qualitatively consistent show – most episodes are at least very good, and few, even during the show’s rougher patches, are obvious outliers one way or another. Normally, I would try ‘ranking’ a list like this, but I quickly found that to be a foolhardy task. I cannot name my favorite episode among these 20, nor can I easily say any of them are better or worse than one another. So instead, we’ll be revisiting these episodes chronologically, from the very beginning to the very end, in four articles, posting Monday through Thursday, with 5 episodes apiece.

Today, we’re looking exclusively at Season One episodes, which has the most entries on the list (there will be one more from the season tomorrow). The first year is, to me, definitely the best – I look at the list of early episodes and how clearly the show was executing on its fundamental themes and philosophy, and it’s kind of staggering just how strong the series roared out of the gate. Each era of the series has its strengths, of course, and there are lots of periods even late in the game where Amy Sherman-Palladino and company were conjuring a kind of indescribable magic in bringing this town and its inhabitants to life in ways that were consistently entertaining and powerful. I love this show, and going on a journey down memory lane seems like the perfect way to celebrate it before Stars Hollow returns to our screens on Friday.

So without further ado, let us begin our journey with Part 1 of the Gilmore Girls Top 20 after the jump…