Becoming a Gilmore Girl | On binge-watching and vicarious living
The only compliment my roommate ever paid me was, unsurprisingly, a backhanded one.
It was a day like any other: I had cast the curtains wide open to let in the sun as I snuggled with my laptop in bed, watching Gilmore Girls to help me forget the fact that my roommate was silently lingering around the room, not laughing at my jokes and not looking me in the eye.
But alas, she spoke: “Were you just reciting the lines?”
Was I? It seemed possible — by this point, I had seen Gilmore Girls all the way through upwards of fifteen times and watched it more as familiar background noise than as a show with a purpose or plot. “Oh yeah, I was,” I replied.
“Oh, that’s pretty impressive.”
I laughed. “I guess so? It probably just means I’ve wasted a lot of time watching this show over and over.”
“Yeah,” she said. “But I only know people who can recite the lines to, like, movies. It’s harder with a TV show because there’s hundreds of episodes.”
“Thanks?”
I watched Gilmore Girls at least two full times while we lived together. I moved out and I don’t think we hugged goodbye.
My current roommates have never seen Gilmore Girls, but they sing along to the theme song whenever I start a new episode multiple times a day.
...
Read more on the "Annex | Cultural Dispatches from UC Berkeley" website