They aren’t just regular moms — they’re cool moms! From Gilmore Girls to Schitt’s Creek, fan-favorite TV shows and movies have highlighted unforgettable pairs of moms and daughters through the years.
Perhaps one of the most iconic duos is Lorelai Gilmore and her daughter, Rory, portrayed by Lauren Graham and Alexis Bledel, respectively, for seven seasons between 2000 and 2007. The twosome returned for Netflix’s 2016 revival, Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, and it was like they’d never left.
“If it all existed in a vacuum, I would play that character until my dying day,” Graham told Deadline in 2017.
Four years prior, the Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist actress told fans in a Reddit AMA that she would always have a “special bond” with her former onscreen daughter, who she helped guide through the ins and outs of filming TV.
While it might have seemed to viewers that the pair had known each other forever, Graham admitted in 2013 that she and the Handmaid’s Tale star hadn’t crossed paths before.
“We never met until we started filming,” she said during a book event at the time, per CNN. “She was brand new — had never filmed anything. There’s a thing, especially on that show, where the camera moves [and] it’s very complicated. You have to be talking, everything has to be exactly right. Then you have to land at a certain mark. She’d never hit a mark before. And so I would put my arm around her and often be arm-in-arm with her.”
When it came to their believable chemistry, Graham noted, “It’s just one of those things that happened to work.”
There may not be new Gilmore Girls episodes on the way anytime soon, but fans can find an equally entertaining mother-daughter relationship between Alexis and Moira Rose. The Schitt’s Creek characters go through plenty of ups and downs together, but their challenges only bring them closer.
Though the series came to an end in 2020, Emmy winner Annie Murphy would be “over the moon” to bring Alexis back some day — and to reunite with her onscreen mom. “Just to see Moira (Catherine O’Hara) again, I would pay a lot of money to do that,” she told Us Weekly exclusively in May 2021.
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Keep scrolling for a look at some of the most heartwarming — and sometimes complicated — mother-daughter relationships in TV and film:
