My daughter has recently been rewatching The Gilmore Girls, a brilliant TV series that began airing in 2000 and finished its run in 2007. It is the story of Lorelai Gilmore, a single mom raising her teenage daughter Rory in a small Connecticut town. The show, a comedy-drama, was created by Amy Sherman-Palladino, known for her sharp, quick-witted dialogue and quirky, endearing characters. These qualities were also on display in her later highly successful creation The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

The Gilmore Girls was set in the present, which means that many of the references are of a certain time and place.  They attend a Bangles concert. The rock groups mentioned are of the early aughts.  And most importantly, no one has an iPhone, because the iPhone wasn’t invented until 2007, after the series ended.

Nowadays we are used to walking around with computers in our back pockets that can access any information in the world, be used to text or call friends, and take pictures and videos.

Lorelai and Rory had no such device, and though a few characters have cell phones, they are big, bulky things with antennas.  Oh, and the really cool kids have pagers!  Remember pagers?  OMG, it’s so cute.

The characters in The Gilmore Girls all have landlines,  or what we used to call home phones.

Think about how the lack of smartphones changes everything.  Well, of course, it didn’t change anything for Amy Sherman-Palladino when she was writing the shows back then, but for the person watching Gilmore Girls today, it’s a bit of a jolt.

First of all, phones are either on walls or tables. They have keys to punch in the numbers. And it seems that most characters never bother to see who’s calling; they just pick up any call. Egads!

In one early episode, Rory and her friend Lane go on a double date to a movie. Lane’s strict mother has been told that Lane is at Rory’s house, when in fact no one is there because Lorelai is also out on a date.  Mrs. Kim finds Lorelai at the diner and screams that she has been calling Lorelai’s house all night to speak to Lane and has now started roaming the small town of Stars Hollow to find her daughter.  Luckily it is a small town and Mrs. Kim’s daughter is quickly discovered and grounded.

If this plot were set in the present, Mrs. Kim’s daughter would either a) not be allowed to have a phone and be made to carry an AirTag everywhere, or b) have a phone that Mrs. Kim would track to know where Lane was at all times—end of story. In any event, Mrs. Kim would also have been able to contact Lorelai on her iPhone and find out immediately where the girls were.  Nonetheless, the story in any era does highlight the importance of letting everyone in on the cover story in case you’re being sought by a parental figure.

But I’m sure you can see how much more fun it was when we didn’t know where everyone was at all times.  It makes for some peppy plots.  I feel sure that the iPhone also would have made my teenage social life much less entertaining. Ah, those were the days.