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Old Lady Jackson Spoiler alert! The below contains plot and casting mentions, and some general information you may not want to have until after you’ve seen the new episodes. If you haven’t watched Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life yet, you might want to skip this part until you have.

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Years from now, long after the Downton Abbey reboot (Matthew lives!), the Six Feet Under reboot (literally The Walking Dead!), and the reboot of the Fuller House reboot (don’t be rude. Cut. It. Out. All over again!), I’ll still be trying to explain what it was like to return to Gilmore Girls. That was the first question I got when the show was announced, and the one I’ve been asked most frequently ever since. It’s also a question I don’t feel I’ve quite answered satisfactorily. So far, I’ve just stuttered and stammered and tried to find something to compare it to.

“It’s like getting a chance to go to college all over again, but this time you know what classes to take, and you know how to really appreciate all the, uh, classes, and the people, and, uh…”

No, that’s not what it was like.

“It’s like, if you got back together with an old boyfriend, but now there were only the good parts about him, without all the stuff that bugged you, and you got to fall in love all over again, without making any of the mistakes you made when you, uh…”

No, that’s not it either.

“It’s like if you were diagnosed with a disease, but then the doctors realized they’d made a mistake and you were actually okay, so you experienced the feeling of enjoying every day that much more, because suddenly you’d been reminded how precious the days were, and you were even more thankful to have them because you’d been faced with the reality of how rare they actually are, when before you’d taken the days for granted and thought you were sick but you’re not, and…”

Uh, no.

I have an old email from Amy from December 2014, where she mentions the possibility of taking a pitch out to some streaming services. That must mean that we’d already had our lunch at the Greek restaurant in Los Angeles where she first told me some of her ideas and started sketching out the early plotlines. Inspired by the British series Sherlock, which has no yearly set number of episodes but instead does anywhere from one to four specials, she envisioned four mini-movies that would run about ninety minutes each.

At that lunch, she asked if I’d read the Marie Kondo book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Yes, I had, I replied. She also kept asking me if I’d read Wild and/or seen the movie. Yes to both, I told her, and why was she asking? We hadn’t seen each other in a while and the reality of getting back together to do the show again seemed so far away, which meant we kept getting distracted and going off on tangents and she never really answered me about either. What she was mainly there to ask me was, if it was possible to somehow put this thing together, would I be interested?

Why, yes—yes, I would be.

A few months later, in early spring of 2015, Amy and Dan felt we were inching closer to the reality of making the show at Netflix, but we were still too far away to make any formal announcement. Warner Brothers and Netflix had to agree to a deal first, and then Amy and Dan would go in and pitch the story ideas, or was it the other way around? Would it be better to pitch the ideas first, then see if everyone could make a deal? This was all new territory. The two entities would be paying for the show, and they had to make nice with each other first, and that process was complicated. The existence of streaming was new, rebooting a show on a different network was new, and turning a show that once had been an hour long minus time for commercials into uninterrupted ninety-minute movies was new. And notice that no one was even talking about the actors yet. This could all take a while. “The Green Eggs and Ham deal took eighteen months,” Amy told me. Eighteen months? Also, they’re making Green Eggs and Ham into a movie? Anyway, I knew we didn’t have that much time, in part because of the back lot.

The back lot. Oy.

You’ve heard of the town of Stars Hollow? Well, I’m here to tell you, it is real. It’s a wonderful, happy place with cheerful neighbors, ballerinas taking classes at Miss Patty’s, and a seasonal festival of some sort happening in the town square. It’s a place where the coffee flows freely, junk food has no calories, and Kirk has somehow found yet another job. There, the town meeting might be in session (although I’m usually late for it), with Taylor Doose presiding, and outside, near the gazebo, there could be a hay bale maze set up for your enjoyment. It’s a place where, on one special day every year, I smell snow. If that’s where you’d like to leave your understanding of our beloved town, please skip the next paragraph.

Because sometimes it’s also a place in Los Angeles on the Warner Brothers lot, where other people from other shows come to visit, and sometimes they stay for a while—occasionally for years. Shockingly, it turned out that no one had reserved that spot for us indefinitely and held it frozen in time in the event of our triumphant return. Lots of other shows needed the back lot around the same dates we needed it, so we’d been given a very narrow time frame in which to use it. Obviously, when you’re returning to Stars Hollow, you have to have an actual Stars Hollow. But the reality of the scheduling was that if we couldn’t find a way to start filming by February 2016, basically we wouldn’t be filming at all.