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Christie: architect of the country house mystery and the scene in which all the suspects are gathered in a room as the detective — her best-known are the fussy Belgian expat Hercule Poirot and the deceptively small-town Miss Marple — helpfully explains who did it and how it was done.

For the uninitiated, the premise of Gilmore Girls: Thirtysomething Lorelai Gilmore lives in small-town Connecticut with her daughter, Rory, and manages a small hotel.

Small-town politics is threaded throughout the series, and once every couple of episodes the girls end up at a “town meeting” where the gang decides various nonsense, like “who really is the ‘town troubadour’?”

Every historical trait of American populism — its anti-intellectualism, xenophobia, distrust of expertise, hatred of so-called elites, rural and small-town mythologizing, suspicion of institutions, paranoid-conspiratorial world view, unfocused anger and faith in panaceas — fits the psychology of the current Republican base like a glove, at least when its characteristics are adapted to the schizophrenic quality of contemporary American culture.

But somehow, the writer-director, who grew up in agriculture villages like the ones in her film, makes that coincidence count in terms of small-town authenticity — of course, everyone’s connected — and the dramatic stakes that go with impulses and shortcuts.