We're in the midst of a podcast boom, and television recap shows are a dime-a-dozen. But few have captured the imagination of an entire fan community quite like the Gilmore Guys.
Comedians Kevin Porter and Demi Adejuyigbe started the podcast in 2014, when all seven seasons of "Gilmore Girls" came to Netflix. They decided to work their way through every episode of the hour-long drama, known for its rapid-fire dialogue and heavy use of pop-culture references. The TV series went off the air in 2007 after a contract dispute with show creator Amy Sherman-Palladino, but has maintained a steady cult following since.
The Gilmore Guys podcast took off just a few months after launching, in part thanks to some early coverage from The Atlantic. Soon they had an agent and advertisers, and were selling out live shows across the country. They even got to meet the "Gilmore Girls" themselves.
Now, the podcast has 300,000 regular listeners, a number that will likely grow after Netflix's upcoming revival of the show. The Guys recently finished recapping all 153 episodes of the original run of “Gilmore Girls,” just in time for the reboot — a four-part series called "A Year in the Life."
Interview Highlights
How the podcast started:
PORTER: A couple years ago, I saw that Netflix was putting the "Gilmore Girls" back catalog — the original network run on the WB and the CW — on their streaming service. I had grown up with the show. I really loved it. So I put out a cold call on social media about wanting to start a podcast. And Demi saw it and responded.
ADEJUYIGBE: My relationship with the show was that it was something I knew existed. And I think my mom and sister had watched in bits and pieces of my growing up, but I had never seen anything from it. I just thought it would be a fun thing to do, so I said yeah.
On the show's audience:
ADEJUYIGBE: You’d be surprised at how many men there are, how many non-white people that are outside of what you would think of as a “Gilmore Girls” fan. But it doesn’t really feel like there’s one specific image of what someone who listens to our podcast is, because we'll do live shows and we'll see all sorts of people in the audience.
On the podcast becoming a job:
ADEJUYIGBE: It did become a job. It's a source of income for us and something that we have to take seriously and treat as a job. Which in some ways was burdensome, thinking, I like this show ... but every time I watched it, I was like, I don't want to watch the next episode. I just want to get it over with.
PORTER: Yeah, there's definitely been points when I'm like, I'm a little overloaded on this right now. Not constantly! But there's definitely been points.
ADEJUYIGBE: We look at it and we realize how cool it is that something we created just for fun is also our job now. So it's been wonderful.
On "Gilmore Girls" fandom:
PORTER: I think people really resonate and connect with [the show] because it's reflective in a lot of ways. And even as hyper-stylized and witty banter and fast talking and ratatat dialogue as it is, the relationships are really grounded and emotionally true. So people see themselves and project themselves often into the show. Stars Hollow is a nice town to escape to — as opposed to some other shows on TV that are grittier or edgier or more violent, or even our own world. I think, for those reasons, that's why "Gilmore Girls" has endured. It's like a warm blanket.
You can listen to the Gilmore Guys on iTunes or SoundCloud. Also on iTunes, you can get this podcast of The Frame.