November 27, 2016 — A while ago I wrote about Sebastian Bach being on Gilmore Girls. Given my audience, I’m pretty sure the only name you know in that sentence is Sebastian Bach, and even though I talked about what Gilmore Girls is, I’m going to remind you. Gilmore Girls was a tv show, one of those feel-good chick shows. It played for seven seasons, airing from 2000 to 2007, on the CW, formerly the WB (Warner Brothers’ tv channel, or at least it was). It’s one of two shows I was ever a really strong follower of, the other starting right after that in its time slot. I was so into Gilmore Girls, I remember literally cringing at the replacement show, Gossip Girl (yes, all shows I like need the word girl and the double-G alliteration), thinking no way. Still, I watched the second GG show when it was about seven shows in and from thereon out. Mind you, the characters on the shows are not at all the same, save for they were all from privilege, but I loved them both.

The interesting thing about tv is that it has syndication. For some reason, Gilmore Girls took off in syndication, probably because it has genuinely good writing in its fast-talking dialogue between the 16-20 something daughter and her former teen mom who raised the daughter herself, but at the start of high school when we meet the characters, enlisted the financial, and later emotional, assistance from her estranged, and blue-blood (like Daughters of the American Revolution descendent blue blood) parents. The writer,-creator and sometime director of the show, Amy Sherman-Palladino, wrote the first six of the seven seasons, and because of disputes, the network had other writers for the seventh season. The catch in the seventh season, other than the characters totally didn’t seem like themselves, was that Sherman-Palladino had in mind from the start of the show an ending with “four words”, but with other writers, those four words were never written for the actors to say, nor ever disclosed. The success in syndication spawned interest in a redo of the ending, and Netflix produced and aired it. This reboot, set ten years after the conclusion of the last show , consists of four movie-length episodes, 90 minutes each, chronicling the main characters, and the supporting cast, through the four seasons, Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall. Sherman-Palladino’s last four words were said. Of course, they themselves were a cliff-hanger, but then again, life is a cliffhanger, isn’t it?

What of Sebastian Bach? Well, he was in one scene, singing and playing guitar, as his character would with a band of one of the supporting characters. He was, as were other of the characters in the cast, obviously thrilled to get a reboot on a beloved character. But the thrill wasn’t him. Sure, sure, he has great hair and all of that, but the thrill was something so very unexpected. And a little more explanation is necessary; I promise, … a little.

The mom and daughter seem very connected to pop culture. Also, they eat anything they want, and never get fat. Dinner is hotdogs, tacos, Twizzlers and powdered sugar donuts. Seriously, shouldn’t every meal include powdered sugar donuts? Besides the food, they make reference to everything from other shows, to popular books. The daughter dropped names to books and plot references from those books in every episode in the initial series. Mind you, this is me, the person who when people mention old beloved tv shows, I can’t remember anything except Romper Room. As soon as I learned how to read, that’s what I did. I’ve read everything, good, bad, … everything. So those book references in the original show were fun for me. Then there are the pop culture references. In the reboot, they referenced my latest favorite show, Game of Thrones. They referenced pop up restaurants, names of those. Lines, they referenced, lines, meaning lines where people wait for things. I see lines like that all the time in Los Angeles, and by all the time, I mean all the time on certain streets, you know with hip-up-an-coming crazy stores? I still don’t have any idea what the people are waiting for. The show mocked that. In the show, one line of people was just in line, not knowing what they were waiting for. I swear I saw that even today, the Sunday after Thanksgiving, young men in a line, and they all had the same pants, the same shoes … and the same beards, but that’s for another story. Seriously this morning, driving to Home Depot, I wanted to get out and take pictures of just the pants and shoes of this line of young men. What were they waiting for? And why do they dress like that? Wait? What was I saying?

Oh yeah, pop culture references in Gilmore Girls. The show always featured and name dropped music, artists and bands, and this revival was no different. The mom said to one of her friends that someone needed to be played some Skrillex (a dj). In another scene where she was making plans for a wedding, her main male counterpart character mentioned Steely Dan to which the same lead woman said “Steely Dan is old-man-music.” She made other references to music, but the daughter-character’s references were more fun. Along the same lines as .. the lines… she mocked people who wear, as a means to be hip, 200 dollar t-shirts of bands they don’t even know. The band they used as an example was Def Leppard. I wasn’t sure if that meant any of the young aged 32 men in her night-out when she made that reference understood who Def Leppard was, or if they should have, or if that was a reference that all young people who are waiting in lines for hip things while wearing Def Leppard t-shirts should know who Def Leppard is, and hence might actually find out.

And then… right when the final episode was playing and the clock was nearing midnight (binge-watching is tiring) the daughter-character met her boy-who-got-away character in the market. They talked niceties She told him she was writing a book about the relationship between she and her mom (foretelling the title of the series and the last four words), she told him how good he was as a boyfriend; he talked about his wife, his kids. In this conversation, as part of the rapid dialogue all the characters seem so capable of doing, he dropped the name Wolfgang. I can’t even remember why, something about someone having traveled and meeting a Wolfgang, but I can’t remember. Perhaps I can’t remember because it was late when I saw it, because I’d sat and watched two and half of the 90 minute episodes in one sitting, or perhaps it’s because the next word in the daughter-character’s dialogue hit me that strongly, but what I remember is this. In rapid fire, after the boy-who-got-away said Wolfgang in his story, the daughter-character said “Van Halen?”

And mind you, the reference Wolfgang Van Halen is even better than a reference to the band Van Halen, because it takes knowing the band Van Halen at a really great level to know who Wolfgang Van Halen actually is. It takes old-school rock knowledge, like where you know the band and the members of that band, … or the member’s child, depending on ones’ view. Either way, it’s the kind of specific knowledge of the names of band members that shows rock is not dead. It’s not dead for the daughter-character, it’s not dead for the character’s real “mom” Amy Sherman-Palladino, and because it was in the show, I venture to say it’s not dead culturally, because if it were, the mention of a specific name of a band member wouldn’t have even made sense.

It still thrills me. What? Rock music, knowing the names of the people in the bands, hearing those names especially in other, very unrelated things like a tv show about a well-read book girl and her mom, having Sebastian Bach in a chick show, knowing that chicks dig rock music, perhaps enough to make 200 dollar Def Leppard t-shirts relevant, and hearing the words Van Halen in my favorite chick show. And check it out, I wrote four words as a title. Amy Sherman-Palladino’s were different, but hey, it does. It still thrills me.

 

(Note: photo is of Sebastian Bach and a supporting character from Gilmore Girls.)