"Gilmore Girls" is about the almost-sisters relationship between 32-year-old Lorelai Gilmore (Lauren Graham) and her 16-year-old daughter, Rory (Alexis Bledel). "Gilmore Girls" is the first series to come out of the Family Friendly Programming Forum, a consortium set up by advertisers like Procter & Gamble and Johnson & Johnson to fund shows that parents and kids can watch together. And, yes, it is a pleasant surprise to find that the consortium's definition of "family friendly" is broad enough to include a show about a girl who got pregnant at 16, raised a great kid as a single mom and didn't go straight to hell.

In fact, "heaven" would be a more accurate description of where Lorelai has ended up. She and Rory live a cozy hippie-yuppie life in Stars Hollow, a cute little Connecticut hamlet, where Lorelai manages a highly regarded inn, Rory is the smartest girl in town and mom and daughter sip endless cups of joe at the homey greasy spoon. (Rory's father is not in the picture; all we know about him is that he's some kind of Internet hotshot in California.)

The boisterous Lorelai is 32 going on 16; the serious Rory is 16 going on 32. Despite the difference in their temperaments, Lorelai and Rory wear each other's clothes and listen to each other's CDs. Guys try to pick them up in tandem. In one episode, Lorelai pulls a junk-food-laden all-nighter to help Rory cram for a big test. In another episode, Rory chatters happily about a planned mother-daughter backpacking trip through France after she graduates from high school.

"Rory is my life. She's my pal. She's my everything," Lorelai exclaims in one episode and her love for her daughter is almost palpable; you can feel it in the way she looks at her across the table, not quite believing that this came from her. And you could feel it in the first episode, in the way she swallowed her pride and asked her estranged, hoity-toity parents to loan her the money so Rory could transfer to Chilton, an academically challenging prep school. "Gilmore Girls" is more than family friendly; it's downright inspirational.

I admit it, I'm sucked in by "Gilmore Girls," even though the show is laden with cardboard cutouts of "small-town eccentricity" (Stars Hollow is the kind of place where everybody turns out for a cat's funeral) and "the nurturing female life force" (embodied by the Rubenesque trio of Liz Torres as a flirty dancing school owner, Melissa McCarthy as a clumsy chef and Sally Struthers as the mother of the dead cat). Worst of all is the clichéd "upper-class snobbery" of Lorelai's parents (Kelly Bishop and Edward Herrmann) and the headmaster, students and parents at Chilton. In every episode, Lorelai commits the cardinal sin of exhibiting joie de vivre in their constipated presence, and they all recoil with cartoonish disdain at the miniskirted hussy. It's like they're extras in a Three Stooges movie; you keep waiting for Lorelai to start the pie fight.

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