As Peter Travers has noted elswhere on this website, the backlash against Juno was typical and inevitable. I like to think I was ahead of the curve on this, as the first ten minutes of that movie hurt real bad when I saw it at a press screening a few months ago. Though the movie evens out a bit after that first scene, I still thought Diablo Cody's Oscar-winning script was too cloying and occasionally offensive.

But last night I was watching Gilmore Girls on DVD (I am in season one and plan on watching the whole series over the next few months, a project I recently undertook with The X-Files; see how glamorous the life of a rock critic can be?) and I realized something: Juno MacGuff is just Rory Gilmore with different cultural references.

It's all there: the whip-smart repartee, the cross-generational references (Juno adores Sonic Youth and giallo movies; in the episodes I watched last night, Rory referenced Henny Youngman and Leopold & Loeb) and the frank, open relationships between parents and their children. Ellen Page and Alexis Bledel even have similar features (though at five foot seven, Bledel towers over the two-foot-tall Page).

Gilmore Girls was one of those shows that never got a fair shake; it was always somewhat underrated (it never ranked higher that 117 in season ratings) and always a little overrated (it had the "this is the way kids really talk now" contingent shouting way before Juno, though it followed in the footsteps of the similarly brainy Dawson's Creek). Because of contract disputes with the CW, creator Amy Sherman-Palladino (now producing the actually pretty good Parker Posey comedy The Return of Jezebel James) left the show before it wrapped up, making the last season a little lame duck-ish. But even considering its cartoonish place amongst pop culture pundits (my favorite is a Family Guy parody where mother and daughter made out), it's incredibly easy to watch and decidedly more "real" than Juno. Plus, there's no Rainn Wilson calling anybody "Fertile Myrtle."

The bottom line is this: Diablo Cody owes a serious debt to Sherman-Palladino, a debt that needs to be repaid via cash, public works or a public apology for introducing the phrase "your Eggo is preggo" into the zeitgeist.