Friends, Gilmore Girls, and the Uncanny Valley

Somewhere between realism and escapism lies deep, deep boredom

I don’t like Friends or Gilmore Girls.

There.  I said it.  

I’m well aware that I’m going to have my Millennial Woman card yanked from me for making such a proclamation, and that I will never again be allowed to order anything pumpkin spiced for as long as I live, but that’s okay.  It sucks, but if it’s the price I’ll have to pay for honesty, then so be it.

I’m willing to be a martyr for speaking the truth on this one.

…

On the surface, my objection is simple: The shows are unrealistic.

The characters on Friends could never afford to live in that kind of apartment in New York.  Lorelei could never afford her lifestyle on a hotel manager’s salary.  Real people don’t have that much free time.  Real people don’t have that much disposable income. Real people have actual problems to deal with.  Rory is a bright kid who works hard in school, but she doesn’t strike me as being Yale smart, or working Yale hard—she’s the kind of student who’s a dime a dozen at any reasonably affluent school.  In fact, she doesn’t even really seem to work that hard.  I don’t see her taking seven A.P. classes a year, doing three varsity sports, four travel teams, training for the Olympics, starting a non-profit, writing a novel, directing an original ballet, commuting over to New Haven to help researchers find a cure for cancer, and going on a three-month mission trip to the rainforest every summer to build schools.  

She mostly just hangs out with her mom.      

In real life, she’d be going to Vanderbilt.  

And, in real life, she’d have a lot more bags under her eyes, because even getting into Vanderbilt requires a lot of sleepless nights and caffeine pills. 

Also, where’s the traffic? Where are the lines? Where is the chair that always collects dirty laundry?  Where are the legitimate knock-down-drag-out fights over a half eaten muffin that was left out on the counter, and the way that it somehow represents a lifetime of being taken for granted by everybody in the world?

Where are the bad hair days?

Why is the diner never out of the food a person wants to order?

One time I went to Kentucky Fried Chicken, and they were out of chicken. There’s no way that stuff doesn’t happen to other people. 

…

The thing is, those are lazy complaints to throw out there.  

Lots of people have talked about how those shows are unrealistic.  And so what if they are?

I loved reading the Berenstain Bears when I was a kid.  I knew that real bears don’t talk, or live in tree houses, or own carpentry businesses, but I got over it.  Nobody ever said that The Berenstain Bears and Too Much Junk Food should be used as a zoology textbook.  Bear Country was obviously supposed to be a fantastical world, far away from the reality of bears digging through trash cans and hibernating three months out of the year. 

Everybody knew this. 

Everybody was on board with this.    

If realism were required in Hollywood, there would be no The Fast and the Furious 10. The franchise would have ended with the first movie, and that movie would have been three minutes of car racing, followed by two hours of funerals, sentencing hearings, and family members tending to Vin Diesel’s diapers and feeding tube during his monthly afternoon away from the care home. There would have been lots of dark, quiet scenes where the only noise was coming from the whir of one of Vin Diesel’s life support machines and some whispering going on in the background. 

It would have been brutal. Most people would have walked out of the theater 1/3 of the way through, unable to watch such a combination of tedium and tragedy.  

…

No, my issue with Friends and Gilmore Girls is that they exist in the uncanny valley of realism.  

I’ve been in enough cars to know that The Fast and the Furious is unrealistic.  I know enough about chemistry to know that The Secret World of Alex Mack wasn’t based on a true story. I understand that the sagas on Gossip Girl are not representative of anybody’s lived experience, even in Manhattan.  I can critique plenty of other things about those series, but the lack of realism isn’t the issue.  

(As a side note: Why is anybody still making The Fast and the Furious movies? Why? Is the culture really so intellectually bankrupt that the last new idea was developed in 2001?)

The key thing that all of those works have in common is that they don’t pretend to be realistic.

I’m not supposed to think The Fast and the Furious is Honda’s supplement to the Civic owners’ manual.

I’m not supposed to relate to Blair Waldorf’s daily life.  

I’m not supposed to drench myself in mysterious chemicals out of hopes that it will give me superpowers. Nickelodeon didn’t exactly have to give me any disclaimers not to jump out in front of the Monsanto trucks.

On the other hand, Rachel, Monica, Ross, Chandler, Lorelai, and Rory are supposed to be at least somewhat relatable.  I’m supposed to see parts of myself in them.  I’m supposed to identify with their problems.  

Their lives are supposed to be breezy and aspirational, but plausibly so.  They’re supposed to be aspirational in the way that model homes are; in the way that J.C. Penney catalog models are.  

And this is where it all enters the uncanny valley.

…

If I’m watching the animated version of The Berenstain Bears, I’m not worried that Papa Bear is moving abnormally for a grizzly.  He’s a cartoon bear building a bedroom suite.  Every level of my brain is on board with the fact that he’s not a real bear, and accordingly, will not be acting like a real bear.

On the other hand, if I go for a hike, and I see what appears to be an actual bear in the distance, walking upright like a human being and carrying a hammer and hacksaw, I’m not going to be okay. 

I won’t know for sure what’s going on, but I’ll know that whatever it is, it has the potential to be very, very bad.  I’m going to get as far away from Hammer Bear as I possibly can.  Forget the opportunity to capture this once-in-a-lifetime sight on film; I’m going to be trying to set a new land speed record.  I was always the slowest runner on playday, but I’m going to be channeling my inner Usain Bolt if I run into Hammer Bear.

Similarly, nothing about Blair’s Waldorf’s life looks familiar.  There is no “How would I handle this situation if I were the one there instead of Blair?”, because it’s clear that she lives in a fantasy trillions of miles from reality.  My understanding of how to navigate life is completely irrelevant to her plotline.   

But Friends? Gilmore Girls? That’s getting back into “actual grizzly bear walking around with a hammer” territory.   

A telling example of this is one of the central plot lines in Gilmore Girls:  Lorelai agreeing to weekly dinners with her parents in exchange for them paying for Rory’s education.

On the surface, that’s a relatable conundrum.

Most people have some complicated family relationships.

Most people have had too little money for something at one point or another.

Most people have had to swallow their pride and ask for help at least once or twice.

But then, that’s also where the whole thing starts to fall apart.

Because like, this isn’t exactly Sophie’s Choice.

Rory needs private school, not a kidney transplant. Lorelai’s parents are asking to see the two of them for dinner across town once a week, not a conservatorship. And, crucially, Lorelai’s parents are just kind of a wealthier, WASP-ier version of regular annoying parents.

I mean, I get that Lorelai’s parents aren’t her favorite people to hang out with. But Mr. Gilmore wasn’t a sex offender who held the family at gunpoint when Lorelai was a kid. He didn’t take off with the family fortune, and leave her and her mother begging for change on the sidewalk while he buddied up to Pablo Escobar. Mrs. Gilmore didn’t hound Child Protective Services to have Rory taken away as a baby. She didn’t devise fantastical plots to have Lorelai fired from her job and placed in a mental institution. Nobody did any horrible, unspeakable things to create such a rift.

Mr. and Mrs. Gilmore were just…parents.

Regular, complicated parents.

That’s life. I’ve got a couple of those of my own.

Figuring out how to set boundaries is one of the critical developmental stages of adolescence, and it continues throughout a person’s life. It takes into account both emotional dynamics and practical realities—i.e. if polled, nearly 80% of ninth graders would rate their parents as “the worst” and “the most annoying people on the planet”, but given the lack of viable alternatives, most of them are still going to be living at home with Mom and Dad for a few more years. They might not want to, but the employment options are pretty limited for fourteen year olds, and Mom and Dad have a four bedroom house with a stocked refrigerator.

In adulthood, the equations are a little more complicated.

The state no longer has any interest in keeping anybody together, and everybody has to decide for themselves what the relationships will look like moving forward.

In some cases, that very much is a matter of weighing “What are we all getting out of this?” vs. “How annoying, maddening, or flat out toxic is this dynamic?”.

Sometimes the decisions are easy. Sometimes they’re much harder. Sometimes the stakes are as low as deciding whether to go to a baby shower or graduation party, while other times, the consequences are going to be life-changing either way.

But, alas, that too is just a part of life. Most people have had to make some tough choices at some point, and relatively speaking, these are still pretty low stakes.

At the end of the day, either weekly dinners with a difficult family member in exchange for private school tuition are a fair tradeoff, or they aren’t.

…

And thus, we come to my ultimate objection—I cannot bring myself to care.  

The stakes are too low.  

In this uncanny valley of realism, I can see right through the dialogue to understand what fundamentally unserious problems everyone is dealing with.  

If this were either a more or less fantastical world, I could get into things:  I could suspend disbelief while everybody waltzes around The Hamptons in couture, or I could genuinely empathize with a single mom who has to reconnect with her emotionally abusive parents in order to make sure her kids get the educational opportunities they deserve. 

The former could be some visually enticing escapism, and the latter could make for a compelling story. 

But this is neither of those things.  

This hits just close enough to reality for me to understand what the options actually are, and how a reasonable person would navigate those options.  And I tend to find the responses wanting.  

The problems are at once too realistic, and not realistic enough.  The solutions both too sensible, and not sensible enough.  It is indeed the actual grizzly walking through the woods with a hacksaw of television shows, except that instead of running in terror, I’m rolling my eyes uncontrollably. 

Things could be either 30% more realistic or 30% less realistic, and all would be well. 

It could be either a zoology textbook or The Berenstain Bears.  It could be a beautiful escape, or a nuanced glimpse into the complexity of family dynamics and intergenerational trauma.  

But as it is, I find myself trapped in the uncanny valley with characters who kind of look and act like actual people I know, except less interesting.  Characters who inhabit a world that I know, except that this version of the world has had all of the sharp edges removed so that nobody can get hurt.  

It’s like real life, but heavily medicated, and everybody is hanging out at the Chick-Fil-A playplace. Real life, but filtered through a Kidz Bop CD.  Real life, but where the restaurants use Easy-Bake Ovens to keep everybody safe.

Real life, but for the terminally dull.