Searching for Stars Hollow is the new documentary Gilmore Girls fans are getting at some point in the near future to mark the show’s 25th anniversary.
Promising to “transform everything you thought you knew about its legacy and multi-generational fandom,” the project has been completely funded through Kickstarter, which is where you can still keep tabs on the latest updates. We’ve also got no idea where its set to premiere, but as it’s predominantly an online project, we can make a confident guess that it’ll appear on one of the best streaming services in no time.
Kelly Bishop, Jared Padalecki, Chad Michael Murray (who we last saw in Sullivan’s Crossing on Netflix), Keiko Agena, Sally Struthers, Liz Torres, Emily Kuroda, Rose Abdoo, Kathleeen Wilhoite, Matt Jones and Grant Lee Phillips have all been interviewed, alongside director Jamie Babbit, writer and producer Stan Zimmerman, casting directors Jami Rudofsky and Mara Casey, as well as Gilmore Guys podcast host Kevin T. Porter. There’s no word on whether other stars like Lauren Graham, Alexis Bledel and Scott Patterson will also be included.
If you’ve been a fan since the show debuted on The WB network back in 2000, this likely isn’t the celebration you wanted. After Netflix miniseries A Year in the Life was such a success – not to mention left us on a massive cliffhanger that’s never been answered – it was expected that more specials would arrive in the future, though they never came. Stars like Lauren Graham and Kelly Bishops have routinely talked about the hit TV show in subsequent years (both have released Gilmore Girls-themed memoirs), but conversations have remained just that.
Of course I can stream all seven seasons of Gilmore Girls on a myriad of streamers, including Hallmark+ and Hulu in the US as well as Disney+ and Netflix in the UK and Australia, but given that seasons 6 and 7 were absolutely awful and can never be seen again, that runs stale pretty quickly. It goes without saying that we should be grateful to have any new content, but if we’re going to have it be a documentary, I need one major hang up addressed (and no, I don’t mean who the father of Rory’s baby is).
The Gilmore Girls documentary needs to address Lane’s shambolic growth once and for all
Poor, poor Lane Kim (Keiko Agena). As Rory’s (Alexis Bledel) long-suffering best friend, she was there in every way she could be while living a double life under the guise of her strict mother. She took a back seat as a sidekick in seasons 1-3, but when Mrs. Kim (Emily Kuroda) found out just how much Lane was hiding, we saw her be vindicated. She could play drums in her band, have a beautiful boyfriend in Dave (Adam Brody) and enjoy her life without having to change or throw food away before returning home. It should have been a fresh start, but terrible writing in seasons 5-7 made it anything but.
By the time Gilmore Girls came to a close, Lane was a smart, brilliant girl who hadn’t gone anywhere. She’d settled for sub-par in new boyfriend Zack (Todd Lowe), given up being in the band seriously by renting a grotty apartment with two boys, then becoming a mom to twins who still lives in Stars Hollow in A Year in the Life, taking over her mom’s old job at Kim’s Antiques. Granted, we see Lane and Mrs. Kim reconnect in the process, but Lane must have the most depressing character development in TV history.
I think I can speak on behalf of all Gilmore Girls fans when I say the creators need to pay for their crimes again Lane (and more generally, whatever dumpster fire season 7 was), and the documentary is the perfect opportunity to air some grievances. Agena is one of our interviewees, and there’s no allegiance to network, seeing as it’s a Kickstarter project. I want to see what she really thinks about Lane’s journey over the years, and I hope she was as dissatisfied with where Lane ended up as the rest of us.
In an ideal world, we’d get another special where Lane realizes that life is short and launches herself back into the world of music, leaving Stars Hollow far behind. Sadly, I think the days of hoping for new episodes are well behind us, but the campaign for lane lives on.
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