Why I love Gilmore Girls even when I hate it:

Yet again, Gilmore Girls has reached a stage wherein almost all of the major characters are acting stupidly and annoyingly in one way or another, and I find myself in sympathy with none of them. What's worse, last night Jess reappeared, and we were all supposed to swoon for how mature he's gotten-- even to feel sorry for him for his mistreatment at Rory's hands. One of those stretches where I realize that both the main plotlines irk me.

And yet...

And yet, when Luke accompanies his geeky newfound daughter on a field trip, and the show wants to make clear how out-of-place Luke is with her and her geeky friends, it has a busful of them sing Tom Lehrer's "The Elements." They started about halfway through, but then kept going much longer than I thought they would in an uninterrupted scene. I kept expecting them to cut away; instead, they went all the way through to "haven't been discah-vered." The scene's very, very funny-- and so is Luke's "What the hell was that?" afterward. Like Cheers and Frasier, Gilmore Girls is terrific at entertainingly playing both sides of various highbrow/ lowbrow, literary cultural references/ puncturing pretentiousness fences.