Gilmore Girls is the Ultimate Fall Show.
What can social listening tell us about why a 24 year old TV show continues to resonate and attract new fans?
Gilmore Girls premiered on October 5th 2000.
While running some social listening on a completely different topic earlier this year, I noticed an insane number of Rory Gilmore references. This made me wonder what was driving such high levels of engagement around a twenty-four-year-old show.
As is usual, I started with search.
How does Gilmore compare to other iconic teen shows of the 90s and 00s?
Google search data shows that Gilmore Girls is the most searched-for show among the other iconic teen TV shows with female protagonists of the 1990s/00s.
First, some stats.
Since May of this year, I’ve collected 2.3 million mentions of the show across Pinterest, TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, Twitter, and Twitch.
Gilmore Girls conversation is happening everywhere, but Pinterest accounted for 76% of all the mentions I tracked.
But when we look at engagements, it’s a massively different story. Although TikTok only accounted for 8% of overall mentions, it generated 89% of all engagements recorded.
This isn’t unexpected, as TikTok generates the majority of social engagement in almost every search I conduct. Still, it becomes more interesting in the context of the show being 24 years old. According to the most recent publicly available data, this means that around 40% of TikTok’s user base wouldn’t even have been born when the show began airing.
What were people talking about the most vs what they engaged with the most?
I’ve listed the mentions in order of volume on the left.
Unsurprisingly, Rory Gilmore is the most talked about and engaging topic. Other things of note were that ‘aesthetic’ is the second most significant topic in terms of mentions overall but is generating comparatively little engagement. (People want to dress like they are Rory, but no one cares).
Lorelai content receives, on average, almost twice the number of engagements that Rory content does, but Emily-based content is really punching above its weight, with an average of 512 engagements per post.
Pinterest is the home to the Gen Z Rory-obsessed fashion girls.
On Pinterest, Gilmore Girls IS an aesthetic. Rory is to be aspired to, whereas Lorelai uses confusing references. The two key generational cohorts engaging with Gilmore content on Pinterest are younger millennials and younger Gen Z (there are many more under 18s than 18-24-year-olds)
But Pinterest seems confused about Rory’s vibe. Over 9% of all GG posts were tagged with ‘coquette’, 8% tagged ‘downtown’, 5% tagged ‘academia’, and 2% tagged ‘old money’ and ‘clean girl’.
Instagram cares almost twice as much about Fall as it does about Rory Gilmore.
Is it because Instagram is more millennial, grew up with Rory, has watched A Year In The Life and now hates Rory? Or is it just that Instagram is the home of the OG basic fall lifestyle? Who knows, but I tracked over 20k mentions of ‘fall’ over there, including one from Luke himself doing a promo for Official Gilmore Girls Coffee.
It’s notable that Gilmore Girls is now synonymous with fall, across all platforms. On the visual platforms in particular the GG tag is often used in non GG content that just has a ‘fall vibe’. This phenomenon becomes even stranger when you realise that most of the show doesn't even take place during Autumn.
Over 20% of fall-tagged posts on Instagram are also tagged Books or #bookstagram, so the literary crossover community is strong here, too.
Reddit is where the real GG discourse is happening.
The majority of Reddit conversations occur within the official GG sub, which currently has 561k members.
One popular topic on Reddit was the friction between millennial and Gen Z viewers.
“I love that new people are watching the show! For one thing, it keeps this sub (and other social media sites) active, which is great fun. The ongoing dialogue makes my re-watches more enjoyable.
I will say that it annoys me when people simplistically apply a 2024 moral lens to the show and then get furious at the characters... for doing and saying things that were pretty darn normal back in 2000. Because if you only apply that lens, basically every single character is terrible. And that doesn't leave room for debate or nuance.”
Alongside this debate, there were so many pro-Luke memes. (Luke is mentioned significantly more than Jess), although we don’t get any Reddit user data, it’s likely that the audience here are a bit older and have realised it was Luke along.
One of the most popular threads was someone asking for help with GG-themed names for a rescue pup “Lorelai is perfectly fine for a dog.”
This again proves that Gilmore Girls has possibly the most wholesome TV fandom (next to Buffy).
TikTok is also obsessed with fall, regardless of the time of year.
Although mentions of fall or Autumn peak on September 1st, fall has been the most used tag (with 20k more mentions than Rory!) since I began tracking the topic in late April.
TikTok is also semi-obsessed with Rory as a #downtowngirl, but more than this, TikTok holds Ms Gilmore up as a paragon of study virtue, with over 10% of all posts mentioning studying/grades/reading or academia. These girls aren’t just dressing like Rory. They are emulating her.
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To a new generation, RG is iconic. TikToker Emily’s Earth specialises in voice impersonations; some of her best-performing posts are Rory Gilmore (she’s done at least three RG accent challenges so far) and Serena Van Der Woodsen.
Notably, the most ‘modern’ TV show she discusses is Stranger Things. She also talks a lot about Grey's Anatomy, which is still on air but premiered in 2005.
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In closing
I’d love to wow you with some deep insight, but after analysing hundreds of thousands of posts, the takeaway is pretty simple.
People want to LIVE in Gilmore Girls. It’s moved beyond watching it for comfort or nostalgia, although both themes are at play here. It’s more than that. Stars Hollow of the early 2000s was a time before social media, iPhones, pandemics, and the emboldened right wing. Couple this with the everlasting allure of picture-perfect Small-Town-America; in 2024, it’s wildly intoxicating.
To the under-30s, much like the rest of Gen Z’s collective yearning for the 90s, it represents a time they never knew but want to replicate. To millennials and Gen Xers, it’s a chance to remember their teens/twenties before life got so complicated.
The ongoing obsession with Gilmore Girls, when it comes down to it, is just about a collective longing to feel safe. It’s the emotional support dog of TV shows. And isn’t part of the enduring appeal of fiction that it stays exactly how it is and that we can always go back?
Alongside this bigger cultural yearning, there’s another obvious insight here: This smart female audience is no longer being served by current-day TV shows.
Much like life, TV has been more divisive over the last couple of decades. Due to the decline of network shows and the rise of streaming, we no longer see what used to be called ‘mid-reputable’ shows.
No one can afford a 21-episode season arc with time to get to know the characters and care about what happens to them. We live in a limited series world where it’s all about exposition, action, and resolution in a ten-episode run. Everything else is designed to be on in the background.
The first indication that the tides might be starting to change is the massive success of Netflix’s ‘Nobody Wants This’, which coincidentally stars two of the biggest early 00s teen TV protagonists we had (come on, The OC was never about Ryan).
A TV show with great dialogue aimed at culturally aware people who read books and like romantic comedies was renewed for a second season two weeks after it premiered. This is unheard of in the streaming world.
So if there’s a (slim) chance that this might herald a new age of TV that can be cosy and cute but also understand that its viewers know who David Foster Wallace was, I’ll take it.