Gilmore Girls, season 4

Rory's freshman year at Yale is the show learning to run on two stages. She flounders acceptably - a shared bathroom, a failed date, a Thanksgiving involving four dinners - and Paris turns up as her roommate, which is either a disaster or the best thing Yale does for her. Dean, meanwhile, marries Lindsay young and fast, and the marriage reads as an argument he is having with himself about Rory.

Lorelai's year is the Dragonfly: permits, loans, a horse named Cletus, and the slow discovery that independence from Emily's money requires borrowing someone else's - Luke's, as it happens, again. Richard's business entanglement with Jason Stiles complicates Friday nights; Lorelai dating Jason complicates them further, in secret, until the secret does what secrets do.

Jess resurfaces twice - once to flee, once to say 'come with me' with no plan attached - and Rory declines the fantasy. The realer danger is nearer: Dean, unhappy, familiar, married.

The test-run weekend at the finished inn gathers everyone. Luke dances with Lorelai and then kisses her on the porch, eight years of subtext cashing in at once - while upstairs, Rory's first time is with a married man, and the season ends with the two Gilmores unable to tell each other what just happened.