Gilmore Girls, season 1

Lorelai Gilmore had Rory at sixteen, walked out of her parents' world, and built a life in Stars Hollow - a Connecticut town that operates somewhere between community and performance art. She runs the inn she once cleaned rooms in; Rory, sixteen herself now, is bookish, careful, and her mother's best friend. The arrangement has one gap: Chilton, the prep school Rory gets into, costs money Lorelai does not have.

Her parents do. The price Emily sets is Friday night dinner, every week, no exceptions - and that standing appointment is the series' engine, a weekly collision between the life Lorelai fled and the two people who cannot say why it hurt them.

Rory's year is Chilton's hostility - chiefly Paris Geller, rival first, something like a friend eventually - and a first boyfriend, Dean, tall and reliable and approved of by nearly everyone but Emily. Lorelai's is a slower question: Max Medina, Rory's English teacher, charming and serious and structurally complicated.

Around them, the town does its business - Luke pours coffee and argues, Sookie cooks and crashes, Kirk is employed everywhere. It ends with a proposal delivered mid-argument, and a thousand yellow daisies to make it formal. Lorelai does not exactly say no.