Tag: Television

The Reverend and the Rabbi

RABBI BARANS: Reverend Skinner and I share the church for services, Taylor, so if there’s gonna be a protest, it’ll be a joint decision.

Reverend Skinner and Rabbi David Barans are introduced in this episode, and we also learn that the church is shared between the (vaguely unnamed) Protestant and Jewish congregations, while the reverend and the rabbi are firm friends.

The town has apparently gone through Reverend Nicholls, and the reverend who buried Louie Danes, and Reverend Melmin (who is Seventh Day Adventist), and now here’s Reverend Archie Skinner. I’m not sure if Stars Hollow has a lot of reverends, or a high turnover of them.

Reverend Skinner is played by Jim Jansen, who had roles on numerous TV shows. He has played a reverend several times, including on Nikki, Melrose Place, and Step by Step. He previously played someone named Skinner in Just the Ten of Us.

Rabbit Barans is played by Alan Blumenfeld, who has a similarly extensive CV. He played a rabbi again in the 2017 film Pinsky. Like Jim Jansen, he has appeared in Matlock, Hangin’ With Mr Cooper, Murphy Brown, Saved by the Bell: The New Class, Diagnosis Murder, and Felicity.

“They’re cousins, identical cousins”

LORELAI: Hey, what do you know about this town loner guy?

LUKE: Same as everyone. Just kind of skulks around with that backpack, never smiles.

LORELAI: Does he also make cheeseburgers and secretly harbor a desire to wear a backwards baseball cap? … [sings] They’re cousins, identical cousins . . .

Lorelai sings the theme song to The Patty Duke Show, a sitcom which ran from 1963 to 1966, and featured teenage star Patty Duke, previously mentioned, as “identical cousins” Patty and Cathy Lane, who looked the same, but had opposing tastes and personalities – so not really a very good reference if she is trying to imply that Luke and the Town Loner are very similar in their demeanour and habits.

Brooke Shields

LORELAI: I once told a store my name was Squeegy Beckinheim just to see how many catalogs they would sell my name to, and apparently my name is to catalog companies what Brooke Shields’ picture is to Chinese restaurants.

Brooke Shields (born 1965), actress and model. She began her career as a child model and gained critical acclaim at age 12 for her leading role as an underage prostitute in the film Pretty Baby (1978). She continued to model into her late teenage years and starred in several dramas in the 1980s, including The Blue Lagoon (1980), and Endless Love (1981).

She returned to acting in the 1990s and appeared in several films, as well as starring in the TV shows Suddenly Susan and Lipstick Jungle. She is currently a voice actor on animated TV show Mr Pickles, and its spinoff, Momma Named Me Sheriff.

Lorelai refers to the practice of restaurants putting up photos of their famous customers, and sometimes, famous people they wish were customers. Brooke Shields may have eaten at a lot of Chinese restaurants when she was young – she was brought up by a “bohemian” single mother, and like Lorelai and Rory, they often had Chinese food for dinner. Brooke Shields does have a regular Chinese restaurant – Mr Chow, which opened in Manhattan in 1979, and became an upscale hotspot in the 1980s. Her favourite Chinese food is chicken sticks and fried seaweed.

“Two wild and crazy guys”

LORELAI: Well, we are not two wild and crazy guys.

Lorelai is referencing a series of sketches on comedy television show, Saturday Night Live. They feature the Festrunk Brothers, Yortuk (played by Dan Akroyd) and Georg (played by Steve Martin), who have emigrated to the US from Czechoslovakia. Culturally inept, they went to a variety of social venues (bars, dance clubs, art galleries) in an attempt to meet American women – who were invariably put off by their clumsy behaviour. Their catchphrase was, “We are two wild and crazy guys!”. The sketch debuted in 1977, and the last one was in 2013.

Monopoly and Twister

RORY: He’s got Monopoly from every country in the world …

LORELAI: Remember he owns Twister – there’s a great visual awaiting you.

Monopoly, previously discussed. There are numerous international editions, well over a hundred.

Twister, previously mentioned. A game of physical skill played on a large plastic mat which is spread on the floor. The mat has six rows of large coloured circles on it with a different colour in each row: red, yellow, green, and blue. A spinner tells players where they have to place their hand or foot. The game promotes itself as “the game that ties you up in knots”.

It was developed for Milton Bradley, and originally called Pretzel before Milton Bradley changed its name. Twister became a success when actress Eva Gabor played it with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show in 1966, but was also controversial, as the company was accused of selling “sex in a box” – it was the first well-known game where human bodies are used as the playing pieces. Twister was highly popular in the second half of the twentieth century.

Oz

RORY [reading note]: ‘First of all, thank you for this very kind favor you’re doing me. I still can’t believe that any one person would be so kind to someone they just met.’

LORELAI: Yeah, apparently Dwight’s last home was Oz, and not as in ‘The Wizard of.’

Lorelai is referring to Oz, an award-winning prison drama television series set at the fictional Oswald State Correctional Facility, which aired from 1997 to 2003. Much of the action takes place in “Emerald City”, an experimental wing of the prison which emphasises rehabilitation in a highly controlled environment. As another connection to The Wizard of Oz, the show’s tagline is, “It’s no place like home”, in contrast to the familiar line “There’s no place like home”.

As a program on HBO, previously discussed, Oz was able to show drug use, violence, nudity, rape, and ethnic and religious conflicts. It received mostly positive reviews, although critics warned viewers that the show could be brutal and gruesome.

Peyton Sanders

While attending her mother’s charity auction, Lorelai runs into an attractive man at the bar, and takes an immediate shine to him. Although they don’t exchange names or details, Lorelai will later discover his name is Peyton Sanders. They go on a date together, but despite their initial attraction, Lorelai discovers that Peyton is a world-class bore and they have nothing in common except (apparently) both liking David Bowie.

Peyton is played by Jon Hamm. His first role was Gorgeous Man at the Bar (uncredited) on Ally McBeal, so this was a return to his origins – at least this time he got a named role, and was credited! In 2000-2001, he had a recurring role on Providence, a quirky feel-good romantic drama about a woman returning to her home town in Rhode Island and getting help from her mother’s ghost.

Jon Hamm went on to have a successful career in film and television, gaining household recognition as Don Draper, the anti-hero protagonist of Mad Men (2007-2015), a drama set in an advertising agency in the 1960s. Alexis Bledel would later have a short role on Mad Men in 2012, which is when she began dating her husband, Vincent Kartheiser, who plays Pete Campbell on the show, a man who has an affair with Alexis’ character, Beth Dawes.

Merlot

[Lorelai walks up to the bar as a man is ordering a drink]

PEYTON: Can I get a Merlot, please?

Merlot, a deep purple-red wine made from the dark blue Merlot grape variety. The name is thought to be a diminutive of merle, the French word for “blackbird”. Merlot is one of the primary grapes used in Bordeaux wine, and it is the most widely planted grape in the Bordeaux wine regions.

Merlot is also one of the most popular red wine varieties around the world, and is produced internationally – in the US, California produces the most Merlot, after the “Merlot craze” of the 1990s, sparked by a 60 Minutes report on the low incidence of heart disease in France, which drinks a lot of red wine.

HBO

LORELAI: Uh, well, I guess, I could water your lawn, Dwight – sure.

DWIGHT: Boy, that is something. If I would have asked somebody back where I used to live to water my lawn, I would’ve gotten a much more HBO kind of answer.

Home Box Office (HBO), a pay television channel, owned by Warner Bros. Discovery (Gilmore Girls was on the Warner Bros. TV channel, the WB). First launched in 1972, it was the first pay TV network in the US, and the first in the world to begin transmitting via satellite.

HBO, as a channel available to subscribers, was able to broadcast programs without having to edit them to remove adult or objectionable material, and its sister channel Cinemax even broadcast softcore pornography until 2018. Dwight is saying that he would have received a much more adult-oriented answer in his previous neighbourhood (presumably in a city) if he asked someone to water his lawn for a few days.

Lorelai has always been shown to be pretty good at shutting down anyone who asks her to do anything for them she doesn’t want to, yet somehow, she is unable to resist Dwight’s plea. I guess she doesn’t want to get on the bad side of a new neighbour, or she doesn’t want him to think Stars Hollow isn’t a nice place, when he seems so excited to have moved there. Possibly her fight with Pete, which she later learned she’d been unreasonable about, has taken up all her energy. Or Dwight just has some mystical power over her. Maybe the same mind control that he used to get Beenie Morrison’s house!