Gilmore Girls: The Complete Fifth Season (Digipack)

With this season of Gilmore Girls, creative forces Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino finally found a way to make the Stars Hollow-Yale dichotomy work perfectly, as each location still stood alone but had decided repercussions on the other. Gone were freshman-year anxieties for Rory and in their place were more adult romantic concerns as well as a class consciousness that, for the first serious time, found Rory on the side of the haves and not the have-nots. While the Rory-Dean drama played itself out nicely and succinctly, it was the devilish Logan who lit a fire underneath this Gilmore girl; the episode "You Jump, I Jump, Jack" was a lovely twist on the '30s romantic comedies that found rich folk at play with words and deeds. Bledel started to fully blossom as Rory grew from ingénue to leading lady, and she was matched peerlessly by Graham, whose passion, anger, stubbornness, and ravishing beauty all came to a head in "Wedding Bell Blues," which featured her two greatest nemeses: her mother and Rory's dad, Christopher (David Sutcliffe). The show's trademark eccentricities were all in place--including a Pulp Fiction party and an elementary school production of Fiddler on the Roof, among other things--but it mined the best drama of its run with the season's last four episodes, which found Rory's confidence shaken to the core. To give any of the proceedings away would spoil the drama, but suffice it to say you will be glued to the TV for this season's final four hours; it's Gilmore Girls at its phenomenal best. --Mark Englehart