Euphoria does something better than just about any other show going right now — it gives you an experience that feels good to watch. For all of its flaws, in the pursuit of aesthetics over depth, it has achieved this aim. True to the promise of its name, Euphoria is the TV programming equivalent of oxycodone.
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Binging a television show during quarantine is a subtle art. The show’s characters need to have an interesting enough life to keep you engaged and give you an escape from your current predicament. While they and their situation must be interesting, it can’t be too exotic, interesting, or enviable, otherwise you risk rendering too palpable the difference between the television show and your life stuck at home.
Those guidelines will keep you within a range of television shows that are comforting, but you need one more crucial filter to find a bingeable show while stuck in your home. That is, the show must have stakes high enough to build tension but not so high that you burn out your attention with one or two episodes.
Only a few shows available on the major streaming services thread this needle. Of those, I have recently been watching through, Gilmore Girls might be the best of the group.
Before beginning an analysis of why it is perhaps the best, readily available binge TV, let’s get a synopsis out of the way. How does it work? Why does it work?
Gilmore is essentially a wish fulfillment fantasy of a near perfect mother-daughter relationship. The two main characters Lorelai and Rory are a symbiotic dyad, as much best friends as parent and child. Their bond is deep and good natured and genuinely loving. That bond alone wouldn’t make for great storytelling, so it is contrasted with the mother-daughter relationship between Lorelai and her mother Emily, a cold and controlling woman obsessed with the expectations and mores of high society.
That is all to say that the majority of the show is an examination of intra-female communication. There are boyfriends, potential boyfriends, fathers, and male townies who populate the show as well, but the major characters and connections are all female.
That female-based generational drama is further exacerbated through a class dynamic that runs through the show. Lorelai left the world of her wealthy parents, but daughter Rory — being a privately educated, Ivy League bound teenager — has no need to rebel against her grandparents. That closing of the loop (the granddaughter bridging the family schism between the grandmother and mother) causes conflict and context for much of the show.
The class elements make for smooth going. The problems are by and large non-problems. An entire episode is devoted to Rory’s struggle over which college to attend: Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. Lorelai’s origin story is one of a brave rich girl deciding not to be rich. While one could wax Marxian about the ideological effects of encouraging people to sympathize with the bourgeoisie, one can’t say it makes the show bad binging fodder. Returning to the earlier point of not-too-high-but-not-too-low stakes, rich people’s non-trauma based family drama is perfect to hit that note.
After all, we all have families, so we can sympathize with not getting along with our uptight mother or trying to support your well meaning teen through the hard times of adolescence. But the absence of real life-or-death consequences keeps the lid on dangers that might blow out our attention.
Gilmore evokes a unique form of nostalgia at this moment. The show was never much of a ratings smash, but it did very well for the second-tier broadcast network the WB (for the show’s last season, the WB reshuffled into the CW). That means most of us weren’t watching it weekly on its first run.
That being said, Gilmore was sent into syndication in 2004, after its third season. And so it became part of the general background noise of daytime and early evening TV in the nearly two decades since.
Gilmore’s mixture of nostalgic familiarity pairs nicely with its season long (and longer) arcs, which most viewers have never examined. So there is this strange feeling when watching the show — it has the comfort of nostalgia with the shimmering newness of something you’ve never seen.
And beyond that strange pairing, the nostalgia it deals in is the latest kind: nostalgia for the naughties.
Ending a relatively brief ten years ago, the naughties are unmined nostalgic territory and are still a ways off from the much upheld 30 year nostalgia cycle. That means Gilmore doesn’t lay in that fatigued pile of the over-sampled, over-referenced pop culture group of the current nostalgia trend (today it seems to be sliding from the eighties to the nineties).
The nostalgia doesn’t end there. As a show focused on the milestones of childhood and parenting, the content is built out of the things everyone can find something to be nostalgic about. To go one step further, the show is set in the sleepy New England town Stars Hollow. Stars Hollow sprouted from the mind of show creator Amy Sherman-Palladino when she visited a similarly sleepy Connecticut town and experienced such overwhelming nostalgia that she pitched the show entirely on the setting. This show is an onion of nostalgic layers, and that onion-like quality is the only reason it makes me cry.
Gilmore is notable for the cracking wise protagonists who chatter incessantly in bubbly repartee in a whimsical small town filled with other clever talking, unbelievably good looking people. At its worst, the characters appear like narcissists who are psychopathically entertaining themselves by running spontaneous monologues. But that is at its worst. For the most part, it hums along with relative ease — just enough references and kind-of-funny-jokes to keep your ears leaning in.
Much like the level of stakes mentioned earlier, dialogue that is frequently hilarious and razor sharp would not be bingeable. It would be satiating. Great TV rides the line between fulfilling and vapid, compelling and boring. It’s middle seat viewing: you’re not laid back as you fall asleep or sitting on the edge. Neither is sustainable.
So it must be noted here, this is not an insult to the show. I’m not saying that it isn’t as smart or funny as the writers think it is. I’m saying that the writers were working on a television show, and that requires a certain kind of writing.
As I continue to watch copious amounts of Gilmore, I ask myself what it is I’m consuming. Why is it so comforting, especially now when in lockdown?
Of course, a major component is the simulation of social connection, of living a life. Without the regular activities that define us, we sit at home drowning in an ego that has nothing to boost it, comfort it, confirm it. It is a feeling of coming apart. While yogis and gurus have long taught us to transcend the ego, no one said that we should dive into the practice of its annihilation without any warning or preparation.
And so, we need to do something to give us a feeling of social reality.
But that only explains viewing in quarantine. What begins to open up in us is the horror of all the viewing we did before we were confined to our houses. Before the lockdowns, we were already sinking into confinement. We were already feeling the need to reach out to comforting media. Think about it: even when we were free to travel and cavort and socialize in large groups, we were already binging television shows.
In that way, Gilmore is not only a view into the needs of our current life in these extreme circumstances — it is a view into what needs we weren’t fulfilling before.
While other forms of escapist media involve danger, excitement, explosions, violence, and other kinds of far out living, Gilmore provides something else. It provides a cozy experience where turbulence, for the most part, comes in the form of everyday inconvenience and miscommunication. It shows us the dream of a life of general comfort, living in a community we know and love and that knows and loves us, being in a perfect relationship with our child or mother — it’s the idyll of being nice people living nice lives.
The enduring popularity of Gilmore is evidence that these humble fantasies are unrealized in us. That we binged this content even before quarantine points to a profound lack of nurturing in our society. We watch Gilmore because we don’t live in Stars Hollow, because we don’t connect fully to our family, because we don’t know the nice life. The question transforms from asking what comfort Gilmore Girls gives us, to why we need its comfort in the first place.
The Seventh Seal (1957) dir. Ingmar Bergman — Courtesy Filmgrab
“God has sentenced us to punishment. We shall all perish in the black death. You, standing there like gaping cattle, you who sit there in your glutted complacency, do you know that this may be your last hour? Death stands right behind you. I can see how his crown gleams in the sun. His scythe flashes as he raises it above your heads. Which one of you shall he strike first? You there, who stand staring like a goat, will your mouth be twisted into the last unfinished gasp before nightfall? And you, woman, who bloom with life and self-satisfaction, will you pale and become extinguished before the morning dawns? You back there, with your swollen nose and stupid grin, do you have another year left to dirty the earth with your refuse? Do you know, you insensible fools, that you shall die today or tomorrow, or the next day, because all of you have been sentenced? Do you hear what I say? Do you hear the word? You have been sentenced, sentenced! ”
I went to the grocery store yesterday in the small town where I live. News of a coming lock down sent people out for supplies in droves. Standing in the crowded aisles swarming with nervous shoppers, too many to maintain their social distancing protocols, I witnessed the fear that I’ve been fighting in myself. For someone outside of the high risk population, I am not afraid of the virus. I am respectful of the things I must do to not spread it myself, but the virus is not likely to kill me. But looking at the empty shelves, overhearing employees whispering about layoffs, seeing the carts overloaded with staple foods, I became afraid.
The response to the pandemic is pandemonium. The people hoard food, and the stock market crashes. Public officials walk out during their live on-air presentations. We receive images from around the world where public spaces are empty. We read projections, the numbers of those who will die. We stay indoors, forgoing social gatherings. Restaurants and bars close. And all large buildings once full with the living are empty and dim — all except the hospitals that brace for the coming waves.
In all of this, we confront not a virus but the horror of death. That little black bird we always shoo away from our thoughts can no longer be scared off our shoulder. Most of us will survive, but our feigned ignorance of death will not.
That awakening drove the panicked into the grocery store. And as I watched them, I joined them. I thought of our basic needs, searching among the half empty shelves for food. And when I returned home, I knew it was time to watch The Seventh Seal again.
The Seventh Seal (1957) dir. Ingmar Bergman — Courtesy Filmgrab
“I’m only painting things as they are. Everyone else can do as he likes.”
The Seventh Seal is Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman’s masterpiece. It is, perhaps, the greatest film ever made. It follows the medieval knight Antonius Block who was convinced to go off to fight in the crusades. Ten years later, he returns to his native Sweden only to find it devastated by an ongoing plague. While resting on a rocky shore, Death visits him. After a life without any meaningful act, the Knight challenges Death to a game of chess — it gives him a reprieve, enough time to do one meaningful thing before he leaves.
What follows is a kaleidoscope of humanity, bright with the illumination of plague. We witness the many ways that humans might confront the fact of life and death, confrontations made palpable by the roaming scourge of boils and vomit and swift, agonizing ends.
The Seventh Seal reminds us that plagues rid humanity of any illusions about our time here. Plagues do not change the ultimate forms of existence. They only chant, over and over, what was already true: we were always going to die.
In an early scene, the Knight’s squire Jöns — who deals with the brutality of the battlefield and the black death with humor, drink, and the company of friendly women — follows his lord to a church. There, the Knight contemplates the big questions while Jöns stays back to cavort with the artist painting on the church’s walls.
Jöns looks over the art, noting to its creator that the scenes of dying peasants is depressing. The painter says that it is not the artist’s job to worry about the effect of his art. He merely shows the truth of what is happening. One cannot avoid thinking that such a defense works for the film as a whole, and that here as we talk about plagues during a time of a pandemic, we must remember that it is important to talk about death and allow ourselves to think about it because it is happening. All around us. Yes, of course, it is happening now in the time of a pandemic, but it was always happening.
We are waking up from a long stupor, when death was a private matter suffered inside of houses. Death visited the neighborhood one family at a time. When it knocked on the door across the street, we rationalized it an unlikely tragedy. No reason to worry ourselves with it.
But in a pandemic we are facing this visitor as a collective. Those who are at risk know that they might die very soon. Those who are not at risk know that they might spread death with the shaking of a hand. Just as we were always going to die, we have always been intertwined in the struggle of life.
We take measures now to not spread the illness, doing our part to save others, and others do their part to save us. But we were always doing that. Every time you ate a sandwich or took a shower or drove to the park, you were at every moment silently helped along by the labor of others — those immigrants picking tomatoes in the heat, the bright-vested workers on the roadside fixing the waterlines, the cashier who sells you gas by the gallon.
The artist must show us death so that we remember it. And in remembering it, we might also appreciate life and those who help us live it.
The Seventh Seal (1957) dir. Ingmar Bergman — Courtesy Filmgrab
“The emptiness is a mirror turned toward my own face. I see myself in it, and I am filled with fear and disgust.”
With death tolls and rumors of supply shortages, we now cannot stop thinking about death. Where once our culture fiercely avoided the topic, it is now the only topic imaginable. What do we see when we stare into it?
We see now that the long secularization of society somehow forgot to weave comfort for the dying. We see now that the youth we celebrate is precious only because it is fleeting. We see now that all the events and activity of public life is reducible to the lonely places we keep our beds. We understand more about our lives now than ever before.
Each character in The Seventh Seal represents a way to handle the anxiety of death, and these coping mechanisms around death are inextricably tied to ways to live. In fact, they are one in the same.
You have the cuckold Plog, who waves his hammer around in empty threats. For him, the performance of masculinity holds the thoughts of death at bay. His wife Lisa seduces the traveling performer Skat, reveling in her power. For her, the performance of femininity calms the thoughts of oblivion.
Mia, the actress, is a loving wife and mother, who takes care of those around her. Jof, the actor, is a loving husband and father, content to revel in his otherworldly visions and outward silliness. The squire Jöns pursues a nihilist’s course of hedonism and sarcastic distance, though he keeps protecting the innocent — belying a more complex machinery at work.
Antonius Block, the Knight, questions everything. When Death himself asks him, “Won’t you ever stop asking questions?” the Knight replies, “No. Never.” He can never stop seeking answers about the existence of God and the secrets behind Death’s shroud. Until the very end, he calls out to God for an answer. The emptiness of a universe with death and no reason for existence is unbearable to him, and yet he faces the horror, he calls out to it.
There is a character who turns from the seminary to looting the dead. There is a girl who materializes the fear of death into her personal lord Satan.
And finally, there is the mute girl, rescued from a rape by Jöns early in the film. The things she has seen in her plague ridden town are so unspeakable that she is rendered unable to speak. Though her actions communicate. When her would-be rapist appears in the forest dying of plague, she tries to offer the man a sip of water. And when Death arrives at the Knight’s castle at the end of the film, she is the only one smiling. She kneels down, as if in prayer, and speaks her only line of the film. “It is finished.”
These characters show us the many forms we take handling the questions of being. Their depictions are neither endorsements nor condemnations. They simply are. And when we see them flickering on the screen against the night in our self imposed isolation, we see ourselves as we brace against the rising tide of a virus.
It is not the time to turn away. It is not the time to forget. The pandemic is a time to face, to discover what it was we were doing all those years before. It is in this discovery that we might find the threads to guide us until our deaths, whether they be tomorrow from the virus or decades from now.
It is in the middle passage of the film when the Knight has supper with the traveling family of performers: Jof, the fool who can see the truth of things; Mia, the practical mother who cares for others; Mikael, the baby who embodies the eternal rejuvenation of children. The family reveals the blessing that is always there, that is forever in reach, to give birth and propel life forward again. It is our one resistance to death, our only path to forgiveness for our failures — we see death but turn to life and say, “Again.”
In all of his wandering, the Knight finally finds a family for whom a kind act could give meaning. Shepherding them away from the plague infested coast fulfills the promise of the reprieve afforded by the game of chess with Death itself.
They dine on fresh picked strawberries and sup of fresh milk. It is there that the Knight understands that this memory, if only this one, can make a lifetime worthwhile. It is when we are together with the hope of a future generation that we can make sense of the mess and struggle of earthly things. And all the while, in the background of this scene, hangs the mask of a skull twisting gently in the breeze. Death watches over everything, even the simple holiness of a shared meal.
And what does that mean for us who now feel death’s presence at the dinner table? Are we to learn the lesson of the Knight? Should we take care to hold the blessed moments carefully?
Death will come, yes. But only after life. And in life — even in a pandemic — there are things that are sweet. Sweeter, even, than strawberries.
“I shall remember this moment. The silence, the twilight, the bowls of strawberries and milk, your faces in the evening light. Mikael sleeping. Jof with his lyre. I’ll try to remember what we have talked about. I’ll carry this memory between my hands as carefully as if it were a bowl filled to the brim with fresh milk. And it will be an adequate sign — it will be enough for me.”
The Seventh Seal (1957) dir. Ingmar Bergman — Courtesy Filmgrab