I guess it’s true what they say. You can’t go back to Stars Hollow again.

I’ll admit, this is one I’ve been looking forward to maybe a little too much. Ever since it was announced that Amy Sherman-Palladino was getting the old crew back together again for a limited Netflix “Gilmore Girls” series, I’ve been waiting with baited breath to see how Lorelai and Rory have been getting on.

But it’s a funny thing. The town I’d been anticipating to be a delicious escape from the incident of November 8 feels more like an oblivious bubble. Is this due to sub-par writing? Or does “Gilmore” just not hold up? I tend to think the former (despite the writers BEING AMY AND DANIEL SHERMAN-PALLADINO). Although in some ways I think we’ve grown so accustomed to the fast-talky, pop-culture-heavy dialogue popularized by this show (2000–2007) that it simply doesn’t sparkle with the novelty it once did.

And before I offer any criticisms, it is still heartwarming to see Lauren Graham and Alexis Bledel and their co-stars reunited. I think “Gilmore” is the kind of show fans love so hard that it grows a little unconditional, which is why for maybe the first installation of “A Year in the Life” I was willing to overlook some rather glaring flaws. But let’s unpack them, and play a game called Was “Gilmore Girls” Always Like This?

-Remember when Rory kind of fell off the ambition wagon and dropped out of Yale and slacked off and lived with her rich grandparents for a bit? Well, that brief sojourn seems to have shaped her as a person to an alarming extent. Yes, she wrote the one “Talk of the Town” piece that made her name. And… then what? I find it hard to believe — or, at any rate, seriously deflating — that she hasn’t found herself in a Christiane Amanpour-like career, the way she always envisioned. Sure, journalism’s a tough path. But she’s a Gilmore, for chrissakes.

-One of the perks of Rory’s relationship with Logan Huntzberger (Matt Czuchry) was always the endless cash flow that accompanied him. But now Rory is seemingly jetting off to London every other week to shack up with him. Seriously, every time you see her in Stars Hollow she’s mentioning how she has to jump on a plane or booking a flight. Are you kidding me? Do you know how expensive it is to book a same-day or same-week flight from New York to London? Even if Logan’s footing the bill, I can’t believe that would be okay.

-And about that: I don’t want to cast too many aspersions on Rory’s affair with the apparently engaged Logan. But between that and her chronic forgetting of her boyfriend Paul — another comedic tic meant to be endearingly quirky — she’s turned into someone I don’t quite recognize. Say what you will about Rory and her charmed life, the girl always had a pretty firm moral center. Is this really what she would have turned into? Also, as a side note, Rory seems to be forever calling Logan when she knows it’s the middle of the night for him, which he never seems to mind, but Jesus. Have a little consideration.

-Lorelai’s mother, Emily Gilmore (Kelly Bishop), was always hard on the help. But her maid in the new series, who has moved into the house with her entire family, is routinely mocked because nobody can figure out what language she’s speaking. I think this is meant to come off as kooky, but it frankly read as a little racist and definitely tone-deaf to me.

-This show used to be absolutely overflowing with smart, blink and you’ll miss ’em references to high and low culture alike. They’re sparsely doled out in “A Year in the Life,” though, and I feel this is a fairly big miscalculation on the part of the writers: Those shout-outs were important to a lot of us, whether it was to delight in shared cult favorites (my favorite moment was Lorelei’s mention of the band Sparks) and to discover new books, shows and movies we’d love because they loved them. To be fair, Lorelai did remind me this time around that I’ve meant to watch the French show “The Returned” and that the English version probably won’t be nearly as good.

-Lorelai and Emily end up in therapy together and… just sit there in silence? These are two women who delighted us with their nonstop snippy repartee for seven years, and we’re expected to believe they clam up because they have an audience of one? Sorry, I’m not buying it.

-The weirdness of Luke and Lorelai’s discussion about having another kid. It’s weird that it seemingly hasn’t come up in the ensuing decade, before this, and it’s equally weird the way it gets dealt with. Luke’s hostility to the idea of adoption, Lorelai’s immediate embrace of the idea of surrogacy… neither really seems to fit with the characters we’ve come to know. Furthermore, why now and not ten, or at least five, years ago?

-One of the great hallmarks of this show that is proudly continued on here is its heroines’ devotion to food. Endless portions of it, multi-course breakfasts of it, impossible snack combinations of it. The somewhat cynical joke is that they look like Lauren Graham and Alexis Bledel, who I’m pretty sure are not allowed to ever eat even one percent of the processed sugar these two characters ingest on a daily basis. So why, then, do we find them at the Stars Hollow pool, fat-shaming fellow townspeople? It’s yet another instance where the show’s former sharpness of dialogue seems to have been misread as genuine meanness, which rings more than a little hollow. So to speak.

-The two people I was most excited to catch up with? Staunch, hilarious power couple Paris (Liza Weil) and Doyle (Danny Strong). This update not only basically writes Doyle out of the picture (OK, so maybe Strong is busy with his other job of being a prolific screenwriter) but turns Paris not into the media powerhouse I assumed she’d be, but the owner of a surrogacy firm whose young clients she refers to as “breeders.” To add insult to injury, it has her suffering a crisis of confidence as the two revisit Chilton as guest speakers. What? Again, it reads as not only wrong but a betrayal of all we watched Paris become as the series wrapped up.

-Were Stars Hollow town meetings, and Taylor Doose in particular, always so grating? If so, I’ve glossed them over in my rose-colored “Gilmore” memories, but I can’t deny I cringed my way through the new ones.

Confession: I only made it two and a half episodes through “A Year in the Life.” I simply wasn’t compelled enough to see it through, though I did watch the end for those four final words… and frankly, given everything else, I can’t say I’m surprised by them. I get it, in a full-circle kind of way — and given that it was always Amy Sherman-Palladino’s plan — but given how much this show has meant to so many fast-talking, independent, ambitious women I know, it also feels like a major, backward-thinking cop-out. If you want me, I’ll be over here revisiting the “Gilmore Girls” I know, back when they were people I wanted to know.