Lauren Graham Has A Very Hot Take On Gilmore Girls' Most Controversial Story

Every fall, Gilmore Girls fans around the world settle in for the coziest rewatch tradition. Well, it’s nice and cozy at the start, at least. Towards the end of the original seven seasons, the beloved dramedy’s storylines start to become quite divisive, with one drawn-out fight reigning supreme as the fandom’s most hated arc of all. Lauren Graham has heard the complaints, and although she offered up a solid defense of Lorelai and Rory’s cold war in Season 6, it doesn’t make those episode any more fun to watch.

Graham brought up the controversial falling out between Lorelai and Rory that last throughout the first half of Season 6 while reflecting on Gilmore Girls in a Sept. 27 People interview. “There was that season when Rory and Lorelai were in a fight, and I would hear from people, ‘We don’t like that. It’s going on for so long,’” the actor recalled.

The storyline began in Season 5’s finale, after media mogul Mitchum Huntzberger (who was both Rory’s mentor and her boyfriend’s dad) crushed Rory’s dreams of ever becoming a real journalist. In her despair, Rory told her mom she was dropping out of Yale. When Lorelai tried to convince her daughter not to throw away her collegiate dreams, Rory turned to her grandparents, living in their gilded realm of carefree dinner parties and event planning while completely icing out her mom. The two otherwise inseparable protagonists did not interact for about 10 whole episodes at this time.

According to Graham, the unexpected rift between Lorelai and Rory was a necessary move to infuse some much-needed friction into the oftentimes copacetic series.

“When you do a long-running TV show, you have to have conflict,” Graham said of the fight. “It can’t all be walking around the gazebo. We got to have some drama.”

And sure, her point makes sense. Obviously, each new season needs some new driving force for its plot, and after already messing with most of the other major relationships on Gilmore Girls, it must have felt pretty daring to finally split up the core relationship that is never supposed to be tampered with.

Those first few episodes of Season 6 do offer up a new view of Lorelai and Rory as individuals, and how lost they can become without one another. But despite some fresh insight, most viewers would probably agree that Gilmore Girls without the actual Gilmore girls just isn’t the same show they’ve fallen in love with.

Thankfully, Lorelai and Rory made up halfway through Season 6, but not before that string of separation episodes had turned from a somewhat interesting experiment into a bizarre slog. The only good thing to come from it all was the iconic scene of Jess confronting Rory — so I guess the Team Jess warriors can somewhat defend the Yale dropout storyline. Although I doubt they’d even want to.