Everything You Need to Know About the Gilmore Girls Revival

To the utter glee of Gilmore Girls fans everywhere, the iconic show is returning on Nov. 25, picking up in real time on Netflix about eight years after we last saw Lorelai and Rory sipping coffee in Luke’s Diner. The revival will consist of four 90-minute episodes, each named after a corresponding season. Called Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, the new season kicks off its first episode called “Winter.” “Spring,” “Summer” and “Fall” follow along, with original producers Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino at the helm again.

As we binge-watch the current seven seasons available on Netflix and wait for Lorelai and Rory to return, check out everything there is to know about the revival.

Our favorites are coming back to Stars Hollow…

Lauren Graham (Lorelai), Alexis Bledel (Rory), Scott Patterson (Luke), Kelly Bishop (Emily), Melissa McCarthy (Sookie), Sean Gunn (Kirk), Keiko Agena (Lane), Liza Weil (Paris) and Yanic Truesdale (Michel Gerard) will all be back for the revival, among several other townies whose faces became familiar to viewers throughout Gilmore’s seven original seasons. See Entertainment Weekly’s full list of returning characters here.

…as are our favorite (or not-so-favorite) men

The love lives of the mother-daughter duo are often discussed at length, especially in regard to Rory’s three main boyfriends. Although the original series finale left Rory single and embarking on a new chapter in her career as a journalist, the revival will have our precocious bookworm running into her exes throughout the four episodes. The first trailer for the new season finally arrived on Tuesday, and teased short cameos by all three ex-boyfriends, including a moment with Rory and Jess talking over drinks. So, whether you are on Team Dean, Team Jess or Team Logan—rejoice. Matt Czhuchry (Logan), Jared Padalecki (Dean) and Milo Ventimiglia (Jess) will all be back.

As for Lorelai’s great loves, both Chris (Rory’s dad) and Luke will be back, though Lorelai is not married to him. Scott Patterson confirmed earlier this year that Luke and Lorelai will still be together in the revival. “I can tell you that we are together,” Patterson told People. “We are together and we’re sort of figuring out our next step.”

Luke seems a true part of the Gilmore household in the trailer, chastising the girls for their love of junk food, but things are a bit murky between him and Lorelai, who is questioning her life. “We’re happy. Luke and I are happy,” she says at one point, doubtfully.

Here’s a photo of the beloved couple as the show wrapped up filming.

Richard Gilmore’s death will figure prominently in the episodes

While all the Gilmore girls are coming back, one loss will cast a shadow over the family. Edward Herrmann—the late actor who played family patriarch Richard Gilmore—died in 2014, and the show will pay homage to him. With Richard’s death, Emily is feeling purposeless and exhibits this in the trailer by hanging a massive portrait of her late husband in the house.

“You couldn’t just say, ‘Oh, Richard died peacefully in his sleep, and now we’re going to go to the cherry-picking festival,'” Sherman-Palladino told TVLine. “It’s painful. I still choke up when I talk about it, because I wasn’t prepared for it.”

Among photos released from the show set, one reveals Emily, Lorelai and Rory standing solemn in a cemetery, presumably mourning Richard’s death.

A lot of new faces are coming to town

The revival will reportedly feature a host of new characters, including a Peruvian couple, Lane’s twins, a magazine editor named Jim, a young man named Damon, a 30-something man named Paul and Dwayne, who is described as blue collar, according to EW.

Sutton Foster, star of Sherman-Palladino’s Bunheads, will appear in the revival along with a host of other actors playing small parts in the new season. Foster, along with Christian Borle from Smash and Kerry Butler from Disaster!, will perform in a musical that will be featured in the A Year in the Life. Fellow Bunheads alums Stacey Oristano and Bailey De Young are joining the cast, though there’s no word on what characters they will play. Scandal’s Dan Bucatinsky will also make an appearance.

Lauren Graham’s other TV daughter, Parenthood‘s Mae Whitman, will make a cameo and share a moment with Graham that will “delight Parenthood fans,” according to TVLine.

Season 7 still exists within the storyline

The seventh and formerly final season of Gilmore Girls has long been contested over its quality and whether it carried out its creators’ original vision. Sherman-Palladino and her husband, Daniel Palladino, left the show ahead of the seventh season over contract disputes. The subsequent episodes felt very different from the six previous seasons, with some overreaching plot points and fewer cultural references that took away the general warmth Sherman-Palladino had cultivated.

Sherman-Palladino still hasn’t seen season 7, but told TVLine that the events of the season will exist in the world of the revival while allowing her to explore storylines she wasn’t able to tell before.

After all these years, we will learn the final four words

Sherman-Palladino leaving before finishing the show on her own terms left fans hanging on what the original final four words of the show would be. She said she has long known what she would write to wrap up the show—and has kept it to herself since departing. But now, the four words will appear in the revival. Graham told TVLine that the last four words will be an exchange.

“I asked her, ‘Who says them?'” Graham said in the interview. “And she says, ‘Both of you.’ That’s all I can say. It’s not, you know, in unison.”

The girls are coming back wittier than ever

Sherman-Palladino shared the first page of the script for the first episode, “Winter,” with Entertainment Weekly, which featured Rory getting off a plane looking “perfect” instead of “drawn and blotchy” as she should look, according to her mother, who even gets a dig in at Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle company. “Admit it. You’ve been Goop’d,” Lorelai says. “You do yoga in the aisles wearing cashmere sweaters while your comfort dog watches Zoolander on his watch.”

Speaking of smartwatches, the first teaser for the revival shows Rory using an iPhone to look up the corpse flower—an upgrade showing that in the world of the revival, the Gilmores are embracing current technology. Not everything has changed, though: the girls are still reading print newspapers and eating Pop-Tarts.

As for plot points of the four new episodes, we will see each Gilmore girl—Emily, Lorelai and Rory—confront life’s new challenges. In the original series, Lorelai dreamt of opening her own inn, and the work that went into that was a major part of the show. Rory was a student throughout the seven seasons and her conflicts, apart from her love life, often dealt with school and college. Emily frequently battled her own insecurities as a housewife who felt at times unheard and under-appreciated by everyone, including her own family. Eight years later, Richard has died and Emily has to learn how to deal with that.

“What does the death of a husband mean to a woman who had a life very specific to her all of these years?” Sherman-Palladino told TVLine, regarding Emily. “And where does she go from here?”

In the trailer, Emily is coping by sorting through her old things to see if they bring her joy, Marie Kondo-style. She also sports a t-shirt and a pair of jeans, something Emily from seasons 1 through 7 would never have done.

She described Lorelai as “a single-yet-coupled independent woman who has had guards up all her life to protect her daughter and to protect herself.” Now, a little older, Lorelai will question, “Where am I know? Where’s my path? What’s my comfort?”

Lorelai in the trailer exhibits restlessness, saying in a voiceover, “I thought I knew exactly what i wanted and where I was going. But lately, I don’t know, things seem hazier.”

Rory, now in her 30s, is hitting somewhat of a personal crisis in the revival. According to the trailer, she is “On the Road-ing it,” and living a “vagabond” lifestyle by traveling around the globe—although whether she is working or taking time to find herself is unclear. While talking to Jess (!), she says, “I’m feeling very lost these days. I have no job. I have no credit. I have no underwear.”

“It’s this idea of, you hit [your 30s], you did everything right—you went to college, you had the good grades, you worked really hard—and yet somehow life isn’t turning out the way you wanted it to turn out,” Sherman-Palladino said. “And because the world is changing [so quickly] I think that’s something a lot of very well educated [30-something] kids are going through. They’re turning around going, ‘I did it. I did the homework. I did the finals. I did the whole thing. I know the s-t. Why am I not getting where I need to go?”

Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life will be released on Netflix on Nov. 25 at 12:01 a.m. PT.