‘Gilmore Girls’ executives find rhythm

Published 9:00 pm Sunday, December 3, 2006

Change is bad, right? Well, maybe not always. But one thing is for sure: Change is bound to anger a lot of people, and often becomes the perfect breeding ground for hyper-cynicism and extreme resentment of the sort that most people never thought they could produce.

Your favorite restaurant gets a new chef? The pasta primavera suddenly tastes different. Bad? Perhaps not. But different, and that’s bad enough.

So when the seventh season of “Gilmore Girls” started under the command of a new executive producer in David Rosenthal, the easiest thing to do was lambaste him and the horse he rode in on and write off the entire series as a lost cause – a shell of its former self under the leadership of creator Amy Sherman-Palladino.

To do so would have been a mistake.

To Palladino’s credit, she created characters and a world that could sustain the administrative handover.

The main criticism this season has been the various obstacles placed in front of the fans’ dream pairing of Luke and Lorelai, who broke up last season after Lorelai finally stood up to Luke and decided she couldn’t wait any longer for him to be ready for marriage. The most recent obstacle is Christopher, father to Rory and high-school boyfriend/deadbeat-dad-until-he-stumbled-into-some-money-and-decided-to-help-pay-for-his-daughter’s-education to Lorelai.

As virulent as the critics have been this season, you’d think Rosenthal had come in and really messed everything up. But it’s important to remember that Lorelai set this whole process in motion last season, when Palladino was still running the operation.

Palladino left Rosenthal with quite the challenge and he’s running with it, even if he does occasionally trip over his own shoelaces now and then.

“If everybody’s life is perfect and they didn’t have any problems or issues, it would make for pretty boring television,” Rosenthal said before this season started at the TV Critics Association press tour in Pasadena, Calif. “Believe me, nobody roots for these characters more than us, more than the people that sit down every day and live with them and write them.

“We also realize there are going to be obstacles and problems and issues that they have to confront and deal with. You know, that’s part of the show. It’s always been part of the show.”

What’s also been part of the show is the witty, fast-paced chatter that results in several more pages of dialogue per episode than most hourlong shows. It also poses a prime opportunity for a newcomer to feel like the writing staff is forcing it.

They don’t nail it every time, but the new staff is finding its rhythm as the season rolls on and stories are becoming more plausible every week.

“Now we have these people … who are so enthusiastic, who come in as fans, who come in as people who have kind of fresh voices to lend to it, and I think it’s going to grow,” Lauren Graham, who plays Lorelai, said before the season started. “This has happened with shows before, and some of them do really well. And I think this is going to be that. So, you know, we are open to letting it be what it was but also something new.”

Change. It isn’t always bad.

Victor Balta’s column runs Mondays and Thursdays on the A&E page. Reach him at 425-339-3455 or vbalta@heraldnet.com.

On TV

“Gilmore Girls,” 8 p.m. Tuesdays, KSTW, Channel 11.