Bunheads: Season 1 Finale

Bunheads is a television version of “Where’s Waldo” but rather than trying to find a guy in a red and white striped shirt, dark rimmed glasses, and a beanie, viewers are trying to spot actors who were also featured in Amy Sherman-Palladino’s previous hit Gilmore Girls.

And they aren’t difficult to find.

Bunheads is actually quite a cute show; the lead Michelle (Sutton Foster) is adorable and charismatic. The plot is unique and entertaining. But the similarities between this show and Gilmore Girls is distracting and at times, awkward. It feels as though Sherman-Palladino had the ability to create something fresh but rather than branching out and trying something new, she took a safer route and stuck to what she knows.

Sherman-Palladino started off with a storyline in the pilot that doesn’t even remotely resemble Gilmore Girls: A dancer in Vegas marries an almost complete stranger on a whim and moves to California. But by episode two it’s as if she fell back into the Gilmore Mold: The music is the same, the setting (a small, quirky town) is the same, the quippy banter is the same. And what is most distracting is that quite a few of the actors are the same, including one of the main characters, Fanny (Kelly Bishop).

While all of the actors are quite good in the show, their presence is awkward because they are all playing very different versions of the characters in Gilmore Girls. It is as if Sherman-Palladino is paying homage to her successful roots but not acknowledging that she is doing so. If she had owned up to what she was doing and had these actors make cameos as their previous characters, this would have seemed less weird. And it would have been easy for her do to so because most of them only appear in one or two episodes.

And please let me just put it out there: It is downright uncomfortable watching Mitchum Huntzberger (Gregg Henry), the cold and shark-like business man from Gilmore Girls as Rico, a burned out bar owner with an apparent drinking problem. Just sayin’.

Don’t get me wrong. There are some good things that Sherman-Palladino carried over from Gilmore Girls. The quippy banter, very Gilmore-esque, is smart and entertaining. The acting, especially by Bishop and Foster, is superb, and the small town vibe is inviting. The temperamental mother-daughter dynamic that is featured in Gilmore Girls is still there, but this time it is between a mother and daughter-in-law, which actually manages to cause less friction than that mother-daughter relationship between Bishop’s character Emily and her on-screen biological daughter in Gilmore Girls, Lorelei.

The thing I can’t help but love about the characters Sherman-Palladino writes is that she always features quirky yet strong female leads. She makes them inspirational for young girls who watch the show.

In the season finale, it seems as though Michelle and Fanny, who have had a turbulent relationship thus far, have finally become close(ish), if not friends. They are working on their final and most profitable recital, The Nutcracker, and everything is going great until Michelle messes everything up by mace-ing all of the dancers. Cut to a dramatic conversation between Michelle and Fanny and it sounds almost identical to a conversation Emily would have had with Lorelei.

Overall I would say Bunheads is a cute show that attempts to be the show Gilmore Girls was. It feels like a very odd family reunion for the actors on Gilmore Girls and it leaves me looking for Lorelei and Rory, and wishing they were there. I really wanted to like Bunheads, and part of me did, but it didn’t meet my expectations.