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On TV: 'Gilmore' season premiere is a bad omen

On TV: 'Gilmore' season premiere is a bad omen By MELANIE McFARLAND P-I TELEVISION CRITIC The season premiere of "Gilmore Girls" opens tonight with Rory waking up after Logan's going-away party, cool Britannia decorations still on the walls, streamers sadly drooping, near-empty pitchers of beer scattered throughout the apartment. She gets up, stumbling around the place, looking the part of a hung-over party girl. Watch the 40 minutes that follow, and it may occur to you that the scene could end up being a metaphor for the seventh season. Without creator and executive producer Amy Sherman-Palladino and her husband, Daniel Palladino, the heart and soul of this series, it looks as if the party is over. Better to say, it sounds as if it's over. Gone is the slicing wit. Gone are the keen cultural references and the smarty-pants social jabs the Palladinos easily wove into each episode. Stars Hollow residents didn't just chat, they danced through each exchange. Now, under the new show runner, David S. Rosenthal, every conversation has two left feet and seems interminable. You can tell Rosenthal tried to incorporate the Palladino pep into this new episode, but all he could manage is a shabby trace job. We know what you might be thinking. On the rare occasion that a TV series keeps going without its creator, attacking the new guy might seem like the fashionable thing to do. It can look like an unjustified, knee-jerk reaction, a failure to cut the new person some slack. But the insufferable premiere transforms Rory (Alexis Bledel) and Lorelai Gilmore (Lauren Graham) into babbling idiots. The Palladinos didn't exactly leave Rosenthal high and dry. The May finale gave him a terrific jumping-off point: Rory had to tearfully let Logan (Matt Czuchry) go to London, although the more substantial surprise was seeing Lorelai impetuously jump into bed with former flame Christopher (David Sutcliffe) after a blowout with fiance Luke (Scott Patterson). Lorelai wakes up to face the consequences tonight, which lends about four or five minutes of profundity to this hour of television. The rest of the time is filled with pointless nattering in what may be the worst hour of network prime time you'll experience this fall, if you don't count Fox's Thursday night comedy block. It's painful. Not in a gut-wrenching, emotionally touching way, but in an "Oh, God, I can feel my will to live being sucked out of my nostrils" way. Not a good start to what could be the series' final season. When Graham spoke to critics in July about whether she thought this was the last hurrah, she seemed to be open to the possibility of continuing beyond this year. But she added a caveat: "The thing I've always talked about is I don't want to be in a situation where I feel sorry for me, you know," she said. "Because I've seen that happen to actors and to shows where the thing is done. It's done. Let it be over, you know. But I don't know that we're in that situation yet." After this premiere, she may want to rethink her position. At least "Gilmore" had six strong seasons. The new ABC sitcom "Help Me Help You" can't even manage 22 decent minutes. more