Gilmore Girls created by Amy Sherman-Palladino

At the heart of this girls-first drama lies a fully American version of Mann's Buddenbrooks.

The once-great House of Gilmore seems to have petered out with the last patriarch working as an insurance salesman and the matriarch failing to keep her family together. Their only progeny is a wilful daughter who gets pregnant at 16, shirks her family duties, and flees with her newborn daughter to eke out an existence in a middle-class neighborhood near Woodbridge, CT.

As the show progresses, the grand-daughter grows up seemingly to have inherited her mother's greatest handicap: the inability to work with her family towards some greater good. Will the grand-daughter rise above her inauspicious origins to become the matriarch that her mother couldn't? Will the House of Gilmore survive, or is it to be auctioned off to satisfy the taxman when the grandparents pass?

Aside from these core tensions, the series provides endless diversions through non-stop generic cultural references overlaid on almost equally non-stop Connecticut WASP cultural mistakes -- where it seems that almost every episode has some gaffe or cultural non-sequitur.

For Gilmore Girls fans, MetropolitanFilm has a somewhat similar story arc and a better handle on east-coast WASP culture, though with stronger male characters.