Alexis Bledel, Kelly Bishop and Lauren Graham in Gilmore Girls.
Courtesy of Warner Bros. TV
Two years ago, I wrote about an odd phenomenon in Nielsen’s streaming ratings: Seemingly every fall, Gilmore Girls pops back into the top 10. The show isn’t an every-week fixture in the rankings like Grey’s Anatomy or The Big Bang Theory, nor is it specifically seasonal like the Christmas movies that show up every December.
No other library series in the history of Nielsen’s streaming ratings gets that specific seasonal bump, but Gilmore Girls is apparently the Mr. Autumn Man of TV shows. I went to the source, series creator Amy Sherman-Palladino, to get her thoughts on the subject. Here’s part of what she said:
I made it a rule that we had to coincide with pumpkin spice lattes. Whenever the pumpkin spice latte [came out], we had to be out there. [Editor's note: Starbucks introduced its pumpkin spice latte in 2003, three years into Gilmore Girls' run.]
It's interesting about the fall, but I'm not totally surprised, because if people latched onto it because it was comfort food and it was comfortable, it makes sense that there's a moment in it that that is — not iconic, but it really fulfills that promise and what people are turning to it for.
Who am I to disagree with the show’s creator? I think she’s right — Gilmore Girls is, for lack of a better word, cozy. And even though it filmed on a studio lot in Burbank, Sherman-Palladino created a place in Stars Hollow that felt like the kind of place you’d want to take a weekend trip to see the fall colors and go antique shopping. Each season’s timelines also pretty well line up with the real-world calendar: Gilmore Girls had a traditional fall-to-spring season every year it was on, and they all began, more or less, with Rory (Alexis Bledel) starting a new school year.
The Gilmore Girls-fall connection might also be self-reinforcing at this point too. I certainly wasn’t the first person to notice it (though I might have been the first to ask Sherman-Palladino about it), and I would imagine that Netflix, which had rights to the show for most of this decade, had reams of data about viewing patterns and put the show back on people’s home screens around this time.
Gilmore Girls now streams on Hulu in the U.S. after Netflix’s rights deal expired earlier this year (it had been on both since late 2024) — and the fall bump survived the change. The series is among the top 10 library shows for Sept. 21-27.
The streaming top 10s in the United States for Sept. 21-27 are below. As a reminder, for shows that run simultaneously on air and on a streaming service, I include them as originals even though Nielsen doesn’t.
(Also, apologies for this newsletter hitting your inbox later than usual. I’m doing a session at a high school journalism conference today and was driving to the site last night.)