In what’s now become a rite of passage, my daughter has waited until the leaves started dancing to the ground and crunching underfoot to begin the first of what I assume will be many Gilmore Girls watchthroughs. It’s been hard to bite my tongue as she expresses discontent with such eventually beloved characters like Paris Geller.
I’ve seen the show enough times that I am well aware that one of the eponymous Gilmore girls proudly drives a Jeep Wrangler. What I’d forgotten was that in the pilot she drives a YJ, which is swapped out for a TJ in every subsequent episode.
Neither is a great Connecticut car, which is what makes it excellent car casting.
A Little Town In Connecticut That’s Actually A Little Set In California
If you know nothing about the world of the show, just know that 99.8% of it takes place in rather small part of Connecticut. Richard and Emily, the grandparents, live in Hartford (Richard works in insurance, so this tracks). Lorelei and her daughter Lorelei–who goes by Rory for practical reasons–live in the fictional town of Stars Hollow, which is somewhere in the central part of the state.
The elder Lorelei, as played to perfection by Lauren Graham, gets knocked up at 16 and flees her embarrassed, overbearing wealthy parents. She continues to raise herself and her daughter, and by the time the show starts the younger Lorelei/Rory are fully a part of the quirky Stars Hollow.
The town is actually the village set on the Warner Brothers studio lot in Burbank. If you yearn for a certain sort of comfort food television, it’s also the town square used for the show Hart of Dixie (and roughly one million other projects). Having the plot of Gilmore Girls etched into the grooves of my brain, I now zone out and just watch the same red Ford Probe circle around the same gazebo.
Like standing too close to a Seurat painting, you can look at something so much you don’t even see it at all. I’m not rewatching the show to rewatch the show, I’m rewatching it to bond with my kid, which means I’m more interested in what she thinks than what happens on screen.
However, the Jeep Wrangler of it all did start to amuse me. At first glance it very much feels like a choice made by people who never visit Connecticut who just grabbed a car that happened to be available at the time (the pilot was shot in Ontario, thus the two different Jeeps).
Would Lorelei Actually Own A TJ?
I can practically walk to Connecticut, and my daughter’s own grandparents live near Hartford, so I know that soft top Jeeps aren’t entirely uncommon around here. It’s a popular enough choice in summer, though they mostly and conspicuously disappear around November. Growing up in Houston, a soft top Wrangler was basically always a soft top Wrangler, which is also true of David’s California-owned YJ.
Connecticut gets cold in a bitter sort of New England way that makes a soft top seem like a bad idea to me, which is why the hard-topped Jeep in the pilot makes more sense. You’d maybe imagine Lorelei would employ the optional factory hard top at some point, but I have done a full study of this and she’s pretty much always got the soft top installed.
Curiously, she also never seems to put the top down at any point ever in the show. Presumably, this is a production choice and not a narrative choice. In fact, the whole thing is preposterous based on Lorelei’s own well stated proclivities; She doesn’t like going outdoors, she’s not adventurous in the way you associate with most Jeeps, and she says she’s not a convertible type of person.
For all of these reasons, of course the vehicle makes sense. This came up on Reddit a few months ago, and someone pointed out that it’s a car that her parents would hate, and that the Jeep “is her counterculture symbol of rebellion.” The grandparents did end up buying Rory a Prius, which is the early 2000s antithesis of a Wrangler.
Not being sensible is the most Lorelei trait possible, and owning a soft top Jeep convertible that you never take off-road and never use as a convertible has a twisted logic to it.
The Car Is Real And Doug DeMuro Wants It
@cars_and_bids Doug DeMuro and the Gilmore Girls Jeep SAGA! Find or sell your cool car on @carsandbids #carsandbids #dougdemuro #thiscarpod#carsandbidspodcast #quirksandfeatures #carenthusiast#carenthusiasts #cars #gilmoregirls
As you can see in the above TikTok video, our pal Doug DeMuro considers Gilmore Girls the greatest television show ever made. He’s also kind of obsessed with this particular Wrangler, which was auctioned off when the show ended (to, of all people, a woman who lives in a small town in Connecticut).
Doug tracked down the daughter of the auction winner, hoping to acquire it. He was tersely rebuffed, saying it was “a family heirloom.” Doug was undeterred, pointing out that the “crossover before car enthusiasts and Gilmore Jeep enthusiasts is me, you’re going to want to sell it to me!”
What I’m realizing now is that every time I’m in Connecticut visiting the grandparents I’m going to have to look for that Jeep, if only to send Doug a photo. Here’s hoping it hasn’t been hit by another deer…
Top photo: IMCDB
When I was stationed in Colorado one winter long, long ago for USAF tech school, I had a buddy who returned from Xmas break with a rather old, faded red, soft-top CJ-7.
I think he has from Upstate New York – where they don’t care if the windchlll is sub-arctic or rust has rotted thru the floors as long as the coffee and pancakes are hot.
You hit a deer?
No! I got hit by a deer!
I’ve been having both computer (Windows 11) and interet (Spectrum, which has a reputation much like Windows does in some parts) problems over the past month, so I haven’t been around.
I taking this brief moment of connectivity to say Thank You to Matt for this bit of automotive/pop culture analysis. This is the sort of thing that makes an Autopian membership just that extra bit of worth it. 🙂
I drove a CJ with no top for three years in Massachusetts. You can get used to anything.
….how?
Briskly.
Still not as bad as Steve McGarrett driving a big Mercury hardtop in triple-black in Hawaii.
i could never get past 5 minutes of the show. the way these women were motor mouthing everything was crazy annoying.
It’s utterly bizarre to me that this show had fans at all, much less diehard ones. Painfully trite and poorly acted. I could never stomach more than an episode in a sitting, of any season, despite having a teenage girl that enjoyed it. The things we do for love.
For me, the dialogue was the point. Peppered with lots of literary, political, and pop culture references. There wasn’t much else on TV at the time that did that.
No stranger than the flip side of this (from a show Millennial Matt always omits), that MacGyver would drive a hardtop instead of softtop YJ throughout much of the series, even though he lived in LA.
Lorelei Gillmore is one of the best depictions of pathological emotional parentification, enmeshment and emotional incest, cutely veiled in season one, and snowballing to avalanche proportions in subsequent seasons.
Neither Rory, nor even Kirk can save the show from the extreme weirdness the initial cuteness morphs into, becoming festering material in the latest seasons. Whoever wrote this show must have laughed at least as hysterically writing this, as Paul Verhoeven probably laughed while writing Starship Troopers with a “let them figure out who the bad guys are” sardonic giggle.
No Jeepness redemption will save Lorelei for me. She could drive donuts in the snow around me in a Willis throwing handfuls of OEM BMW bolts for all I care, I’ll still run and cuddle behind Kirk’s 1964 Thunderbird, and still won’t feel safe.
How do you tell us that there was a YJ in the pilot – then not post a picture of it?
When I lived in L.A. I always heard that Lauren Graham was a monster to other people on the set. I had a hard time watching after that.
They could have gone with Lorelei, Jr.
It worked for the Souphanousinphones.
This is an excellent dad move.
Insects flying around in crash test videos, commentary on 20 year old TV shows… The Autopian is firing on all cylinders.
Ignoring 4wd for a snowy location in the world(albeit short jeeps do kind of suck in the snow) also seems more NYC Cralopnik type writing to me as well.
I’ve seen quite a few outfitted with plows for clearing small parking lots over the years.
More manoeuvrable than the average pickup, in those cases and still practical enough for driving all four wheels.
100%. I’ve seen a whole lot of rusted-out Wranglers with plows on the front. The heater on these things is strong!
Was about to say the same thing. The heater in my LJ felt like it could air fry an egg in the middle of winter.
Whichever engineer spec’d that sucker never wanted to be the least bit chilly
Lorelai makes poor choices, so yes this is good car casting.
Long story short, Doug wants to by a HOLY GRAIL Jeep
Doug is not interesting, though I do find it funny he was turned away.
Fixed.