David Sims Solves the Mystery of Why Gilmore Girls Never Won Any Acting Emmys
The Blank Check Co-Host Talks DVD Box Sets, the Golden Age of Recaps, and Why We're Wrong About Season 4
Welcome to the second installment of the Gilmore Women Questionnaire! This month we had the opportunity to sit down with David Sims, film critic at The Atlantic, former Gilmore Girls recapper at the AV Club, and co-host of Blank Check with Griffin and David, one of the few two-guys-talking podcasts we allow into our feeds, because we love a deep dive into filmographies by director (one of Megan’s pandemic hobbies) and imaginary awards shows that are more enjoyable than the Oscars. In our chat, David brought the same exhaustive lens he applies to director filmographies on Blank Check to the oeuvre of Amy Sherman-Palladino, and helped us develop some hypotheses in response to our lingering questions about why this show worked so well when it did — and why it never received the recognition it deserved while it was airing. We hate u, false comedy/drama binary at the Emmys!
Stay tuned as we roll out more of these questionnaires with other folks you may or may not know as we continue our journey into the final ~and most controversial~ season of the show’s original run. As always, if you love what we do here and want access to our archives, join us as a paid subscriber.
Thank you for making our work possible. See you in Stars Hollow!
Love,
Megan & Maggie
Welcome to Gilmore Women: Two journalists discuss everything that’s wrong with every episode of Gilmore Girls & why we still love it.
MEGAN: You are the second person we’re subjecting to this. Do you remember the first time that you saw Gilmore Girls? Do you remember the context, the episode? Your reaction to the show?
DAVID SIMS: Yes is the answer. I’m almost certain that the first episode I saw was “Forgiveness and Stuff,” which is the Christmas episode from Season 1, where Richard goes to the hospital, and yes, we all remember this. I lived in England, as you guys might know, when I was a kid, and Gilmore Girls aired on Nickelodeon. It was on cable only, on the Nickelodeon channel at 6 pm, and I literally just sort of stumbled across it. Nickelodeon was mostly kid shows, like your Kenan and Kels, and your All Thats. No offense to the shows, but I was like, “What is this sort of grown-up show doing on Nickelodeon?”
And I was very taken with it right away, and basically had to endeavor to watch more of it from then on, because it was really hard to find that show in England. It is a very American show, and it is so far from British people’s understanding of American life that I think they never even bothered to try and sell it over there. Those WB shows like that — Everwood, those family shows not set in the big city — people in England don’t know what to do with those. Or at least they didn’t. Maybe they do. I don’t know how Gilmore Girls is treated in Britain now.