‘Gilmore Girls’ Fans Take Serious Issue With the Way Weight Was Dealt With On The Show
Lorelai Gilmore and Rory Gilmore could eat anything they wanted and never gained weight. Their svelte figures and voracious appetites were regularly acknowledged during the seven-season run of Gilmore Girls. Lorelai and Rory’s thinness certainly wasn’t a problem, but many fans take issue with the way weight was addressed, not only during the show’s original run but in the 2016 Netflix revival, Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life. Fat-shaming jokes were a regular part of the show’s repertoire.
Lorelai and Rory poked fun at different body types during the show’s original run
Amy Sherman-Palladino and her husband and writing partner, Dan Palladino, never shied away from fat jokes. During the show’s seven-season run, both Rory and Lorelai were guilty of fat-shaming, point out Reddit users. Lorelai reacts in disgust at the size of a pair of underwear, and Rory comments on the size of a Ballerina at Yale. Lorelai and Rory weren’t the only ones to sling hate at peoples’ sizes, either. Kirk Gleason suggests Lorelai and Rory weighed down his pedicab, too.
Fat-shaming, if you look at it closely, was everywhere in Gilmore Girls. The issue was further complicated by the way they also glorified junk food and eating copious amounts. Lauren Graham, who portrayed Lorelai for all seven seasons, even discussed her distaste for the eating habits she had to act out on the show.
A scene at the public pool in Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life grated on people’s nerves
Gilmore Girls was a show filmed in the early 2000s. While it may not seem that long ago, society has changed drastically since the pilot episode aired. Some fans have argued that the fat-shaming seen in Gilmore Girls was more a symptom of the times. While that may be true, Sherman-Palladino didn’t tone it down in the revival, either.
In the 2016 Netflix revival, Lorelai and Rory spend a fair portion of their time at a public pool discussing another resident’s weight. The “joke” extends when Rory calls Pat “Fat” to his face. Glamour points out that the scene adds nothing to the plot and seems to be a cheap shot intended to get a cheap laugh. It didn’t get a laugh, though. Many fans found the scene so unnecessary that they report getting secondhand embarrassment from it.
The show did, however, employ men and women of various shapes and sizes
What is most perplexing to fans of the series is that the fat-shaming jokes appear to deviate from the show’s casting completely. Gilmore Girls had a fairly body-diverse cast. That body-diversity was not treated as a punchline, either, in most cases. Melissa McCarthy and Liz Torres, who played Sookie St. James and Ms. Patty, respectively, had body types that were much different from Lorelai and Rory. The same can be said for Gypsy and Babette.
The male cast was also varied in height and weight. Jason Stiles, one of Lorelai’s love interests, was shorter than Luke Danes and Christopher Hayden. Taylor Doosey had a different body type than Kirk, Luke, and Jackson Belville. Weight was rarely mentioned when it came to the main cast, but extras and actors with bit parts were never safe. Fans point out that weight obsession is also present in other works by Sherman-Palladino.
