‘Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life’: The Real Reason Luke Danes and Lorelai Gilmore’s Wedding Wasn’t Shown
Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life ended on a cliffhanger. Before Rory Gilmore revealed that she was pregnant, Lorelai Gilmore finally married Luke Danes. The moment was one that Gilmore Girls fans had been waiting years to see. The actual wedding, however, was pretty underwhelming. There is a reason for that. Amy Sherman-Palladino and Dan Palladino originally intended to make the wedding a bigger deal than it was. Netflix stepped in and put an end to it, though.
Luke and Lorelai’s wedding was a simple affair in the town’s gazebo
Gilmore Girls fans were excited to see Luke and Lorelai say, “I do.” It was a long journey to get the pair down the aisle. Luke and Lorelai’s flirtation began in season 1 of Gilmore Girls. Several seasons later, the couple finally got together to break up over Emily Gilmore’s attempt to push Lorelai and Christopher Hayden together. They got back together, got engaged, and were planning their life together when Luke’s daughter, April Nardini, showed up.
April’s presence and Lorelai’s decision to sleep with Christopher destroyed hopes for a Luke and Lorelai wedding during the show’s original run. Sherman-Palladino and Palladino knew that the pair had to get married at some point during the revival. It happened in the final minutes of Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, in the town’s gazebo in front of just a few close friends. The intimate affair was not what was initially planned.
Lorelai initially vetoed getting married in the square in Gilmore Girls
The scene played out in a decidedly Stars Hollow way. It was small, intimate, and sweet. In a way, it did pay homage to Luke and Lorelai’s relationship. Still, it hardly seems like the type of affair that Lorelai would have wanted, especially when you consider the deep connection she had to the town’s residents.
The wedding felt very unlike Lorelai, argue some fans. That is because it was. Lorelai vetoed the idea of getting married in the gazebo way back in season 6 of Gilmore Girls. Sookie St. James initially suggested the town square as the location for her original wedding to Luke, and she shot down the idea. That wedding, the one that never happened, was set to take place outside of Stars Hollow in a small church that she and Sookie happened upon while looking for wedding invitations.
Amy Sherman-Palladino and Dan Palladino didn’t intend for the wedding to be understated
Sherman-Palladino and Palladino never meant for the wedding to be understated and quiet. In fact, they had planned a pretty large affair. In an interview with TV Line, the Palladinos revealed that they planned an extravaganza, but budgetary constraints made it impossible. They said, “The wedding was a whole shebang. And then they took money away from us. Anything that has extras in it and costumes became a production nightmare. So we had to figure out how to make this wedding satisfying without doing ‘The Big Wedding.’” They scaled down the big wedding into a much smaller, more intimate affair to make the budget work.
Palladino later revealed that perhaps they should have spread the budget they had around a bit more. The famed showrunners spent much of their money on the Life and Death Brigade extravaganza and the Stars Hollow musical. While the former scene made a lot of sense to fans, most could have lived without the latter. The musical is the portion of the revival that is almost universally despised.
