Smells Like Stars Hollow: How Much of ‘Gilmore Girls’ Is Set in the Fall?

On August 14, 2023, an Instagram user posted a video of cozy fall footage—rain trickling down a window, brown leaves lining a footpath, a candle called simply “autumn”—overlaid with the words “the air is starting to feel very ah ah ahhhhhhhhha alalalalalala.”

Those in the know get the video’s message from that description alone: It’s almost time for the annual Gilmore Girls fall rewatch. But the post has a few other context clues for anyone who needs them. The audio track is transitional music from the show—soft, acoustic guitar–backed aahs and las (which explains the seeming gibberish in the text overlay). The account username is @gilmoregirlswhispers, and the caption reads “it’s almost gilmore girls season.”

As of August 2024, the video had been viewed 9 million times—and that’s just one of countless similar posts across social media.

To many fans, Gilmore Girls is just as integral to the fall framework as pumpkin spice and leaf-peeping. The reason why might seem self-evident: It’s set in the idyllic (and fictional) New England village of Stars Hollow, where the sweaters are often warm, the coffee is always hot, and children occasionally parade down the street dressed as apples.

But Gilmore Girls, which ran from 2000 to 2007, isn’t only a fall show; the story covers all four seasons, and plenty of memorable moments occur in winter, spring, and summer. So how did the series become synonymous with autumn—and how much of it actually takes place during that season?

Straight out of Central Casting

Autumn was baked into Gilmore Girls from the get-go. In October 1999, after creator Amy Sherman-Palladino had just sold the concept of a show about a mother-daughter friendship, she and her husband, Daniel Palladino, visited Mark Twain’s house in Hartford, Connecticut. They stayed at a quaint inn in the small town of Washington, where Sherman-Palladino experienced all that New England fall had to offer.

“There were signs that said, ‘Hayrides on Friday nights,’ and there was a pumpkin patch. Somebody pulled over and said, ‘We’re looking for the apple-picking,’ ” she told Rolling Stone in 2023. “It was all very beautiful and cute and I said to Dan, ‘It’s like Central Casting came out and created this town. Do people really live like this?’ ”

Back at the inn, she grabbed a notepad and started plotting what became Gilmore Girls. “It all tumbled out and I think because I was affected at that particular time with those particular visuals, we leaned into that,” she said. “It’s an element I wanted the show to have.” This idealized autumn helped establish the characters as small-towners who care for each other and relish coming together for a community event—a stark contrast from the staid, WASP-y, and emotionally frosty upbringing Lorelai Gilmore had fled before having Rory.

And since Sherman-Palladino shot with a piddling budget on a studio lot in Burbank, California, the strong fall setting also gave production designers a chance to set the scene without spending much. “[You] can do a lot with twinkle lights and pumpkins,” she said. 

Crunching Numbers on Crunchy Leaves

The cultural phenomenon of “Gilmore Girls fall” implies that Stars Hollow is Halloweentown without all the monsters (or, in fact, without Halloween at all—the show generally favors seasonal celebrations over holiday-specific ones). But Gilmore Girls doesn’t take place in some magically perpetual autumn, nor is the story confined to that season.

To find out how much of Gilmore Girls actually does happen in the fall, we counted the number of episodes set during each season. It’s far from an exact science: For one thing, seasons’ start and end dates don’t necessarily match our conceptions of them. By the astronomical schedule, summer doesn’t cede to autumn until the autumnal equinox circa September 22—at which point many people are already weeks into their beloved autumnal activities, Gilmore Girls rewatch included. And while plenty of us mentally transition to winter (Christmas-coded or otherwise) right after Thanksgiving, fall technically sticks around until the winter solstice circa December 21. 

In the spirit of taking cues from the show itself, we categorized episodes based on their seasonal vibe rather than adhering to technical time frames. If Rory has already started her fall semester of school, we’re calling that a fall episode. Any episode with snow counts toward the winter tally. And if Lorelai comments on the mailman being back in shorts? That’s a spring episode if there ever was one.

There’s definitely gray area here. Season 5, episode 2, for example, could go in the summer bucket: Rory’s still on summer break, and the Dragonfly Inn is decked out in flowers. But Stars Hollow kicks off cider season with the Cider Mill Parade—potent enough imagery that we decided to toss this one to autumn.

Another complicating factor is that filming in famously season-less California means the natural plant growth in Stars Hollow often contradicts the clothing and decor. The cast might be bundled up in heavy coats, for example, while the trees and lawns are covered in greenery. Since New England’s chilly temperatures can have you in winter wear when it’s no longer (or not yet) winter, it’s sometimes tough to ID the season. Certain calendar markers help clear up the confusion—e.g. Lorelai’s birthday in April, Rory’s birthday in October, Lunar New Year, Valentine’s Day, a spring break trip—but several episodes are still more or less a judgment call, and the line between winter and spring is especially blurry.

In short, take our data with a grain of salt; conducting your own study might net different results. Broadly speaking, there are more fall and spring episodes than summer and winter ones—in the total tally for the series, spring comes out on top with 53, followed by fall at 48, winter at 35, and summer trailing with only 17. But this breakdown is skewed by our methodology: There are some fall episodes that could have gone to summer and some spring episodes that could have gone to winter (among other shifts). In that case, you’re looking at a more even distribution across all four seasons, albeit still with a summer deficit.

What we do feel confident in saying is that Gilmore Girls is not overwhelmingly set during fall. So why is it such a fall show?

Digging Into Gilmore Girls Fall

Answering that question isn’t an exact science, either. New seasons of Gilmore Girls, like many shows in the pre-streaming TV landscape, premiered in the fall—but Gilmore Girls was pushing twinkle lights and pumpkins much harder than, say, Lost.  

And the autumn episodes are some of the show’s strongest, from “Kiss and Tell” (season 1, episode 7), which sees Rory and best friend Lane Kim in full pilgrim regalia for the annual autumn festival, to “Knit, People, Knit” (season 7, episode 9), featuring a town knit-a-thon that pretty much explains itself.

Many of the show’s non-autumn episodes also promote the kind of cozy behavior we love to indulge in when the weather cools off. Rory and Lorelai’s movie nights and steaming cups of coffee transcend a single stretch of the year, and even the meteorological ambiguity between summer and autumn or winter and spring serves to further the fall agenda. In Stars Hollow, sweaters, pants, and light jackets are practically the year-round uniform, and diner owner Luke is almost never not sporting a flannel shirt. Not to mention that the theme song montage is filtered through a golden glow and features a stunning aerial shot of fall foliage.

Plus, nostalgia is a powerful tool. If you used to watch Rory head back to school when you were also heading back to school, there’s a pretty good chance that back-to-school season—forget that you haven’t entered a classroom in years—still evokes the show for you. As new generations discover Gilmore Girls, they’re no doubt influenced by a quarter-century’s worth of serial rewatchers reinforcing its autumn association. Where we lead, they will follow.

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