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I agree with your summary, although I'd argue Rory and Lorelei's fall from grace started in the last two seasons (I had to check the Wikipedia summary to remind myself of when stuff happened exactly) where it seemed like the writers had them just starting to act much dumber than usual in attempt to create dramatic tension. It felt like the writers were actively avoiding letting them be happy. And the reboot just turned that up to 11.
To be fair, although the show focuses on their point of view so it's not obvious at a glance, Rory and Lorelei are pretty terrible self-centered people, so it's hard to feel too bad for them.
Man, I could put up a whole new effortpost about how bad Rom-Com TV shows are at writing happy marriages. Having written themselves towards a marriage that should be happy, the writers typically either need to throw up strange obstacles to create tension, toss one of the characters the idiot ball so they fuck it up, or they just draw out the process of getting together/marriage for so long that the audience gets restless.
GG suffers from the latter in the late seasons, Rory has met Logan and Lorelei is with Luke openly, but they can't just have happy marriages so they keep drawing it out with increasingly strange obstacles and weird reticence to commit. HIMYM did the idiot ball thing, from what I recall of friends complaining about it, with the couples creating drama by going off the deep end completely at random. SATC would have no idea how to write Charlotte's first marriage, so they just gave him terminal ED. The Office, I never watched in detail but people generally say it peaked at the Wedding and declined thereafter.
Even the Big Bang Theory, I will go to the mat arguing that the first season was brilliant (to me as a nerdy 16 year old with a group of friends fairly well described as a mix of Indians, Jews, and autists). But they had no idea how to write it once they coupled the characters up. The first season is a classic Rom-Com, and ends with the leads kissing, as a self contained story it works. After that the show went into terminal decline, they had no idea how to deal with the unrealistic aftermath.
Hooray for the /comments page. It's a shame there's no "/comments, but just the ones replying to two-week-old threads, since everything else is easier to read threaded" page.
I'd love to see this in Friday Fun some time.
... especially if you've got any thoughts about "Mad About You". I barely remember it now (though now I find out there was recently an 8th season, produced decades after season 7!?!), and what I remember does include a few "idiot ball" episodes, but I remember thinking decades ago that it really stood out from the crowd of implausibly-drawn-out "Sam and Diane" "will they wont they" romantic melodrama subplots. The main characters were a happily married couple from episode 1, the show A plots were about their interpersonal issues with each other and family and friends, and yet IIRC they managed to get several seasons out of that without most of the spousal issues being ridiculously foolish or melodramatic. IMDB says there wasn't much quality decline until halfway through season 6.
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I haven't watched the show, but doesn't this go back to the basic rule of Story that the OG happy ending is a wedding, always was and always will be and the audience know this, and don't want to change it.
If you run Rory's story forward, either she needs to get married (which from the perspective of the people making the show defeats the point), or she needs to end up in a relationship such that the future wedding can be implied, or you need to deal with the fact that she is going to end up with a life the vast majority of the audience don't want.
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