Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: March 8, 2001
PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: Gilmore Girls, “Star-Crossed Lovers and Other Strangers” (Season 1, Episode 16). [Stream the episode on Netflix.]
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: Dean was Rory’s best boyfriend on Gilmore Girls. That probably needs to be said before we can move on to anything else. Part of it is that all her other boyfriends were so bad. Logan was a spoiled rich boy who was more concerned with the push/pull of living up to/rebelling against his upbringing to actually be an interesting person in his own right. Meanwhile, Jess was a bratty, angry, James Dean wannabe smarter-than-thou sneering miscreant who tried to pull that “I treat everybody like shit except you, so you must be special” game on Rory, and it infuriatingly worked for a year or so. So Dean was Rory’s best boyfriend by process of elimination more than anything else.
But also? Dean was goddamned adorable. He was nice to Rory; he was sweet to her mother; he had a bad haircut, but honestly, who among us didn’t in the spring of 2001. In the first-season episode “Star-Crossed Lovers and Other Strangers,” Dean and Rory celebrate their three-month anniversary, which is the kind of thing beautiful-idiot teenagers with no real sense of the passage of time do, which is fine. As a present, though, Dean gets Rory a car. A CAR. A car that he’s restoring for her. With, like, his own hands. I think Jess got Rory a Hemingway paperback once. And then Dean told her he loved her! And Rory had to, like, think about it! And he kept on loving her anyway instead of moving on to literally any other girl or woman (or 7-8% of the men) who would have literally jumped at such a gesture.
Get it together, Rory.
[You can watch Gilmore Girls‘ “Star-Crossed Lovers and Other Strangers” on Netflix.]
