Gilmore Girls Vet Milo Ventimiglia Shows True 'Team Dean' Colors, And Jared Padalecki's Response Is Gold

gilmore girls jess milo ventimiglia

The original run of Gilmore Girls may have ended almost a full 14 years ago, but there are plenty of issues which were brought up by the long-running hit which still divide the fandom. Perhaps the most pressing of these matters is a topic that shall be debated by viewers for generations to come: Which of Rory's boyfriends was better? There are many people who could write whole thesis studies on whether or not Dean or Jess was most suited for the smart, fast-talking young lady, but now Milo Ventimiglia has made his choice known, and Jared Padalecki's response is pure gold.

Look, the question of which guy Rory Gilmore should have ended up with by the end of Gilmore Girls is going to haunt the fandom forever. Throughout the show's seven-season run, there were viewers who would proclaim to be Team Dean or Team Jess (And, no, I did not forget Logan. I'm just pretending he doesn't exist.), in their hopes for a final pairing, and now Jess himself, Milo Ventimiglia, has declared his Team Dean leanings to the world by way of an interview on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. When asked by Fallon about a hand-written sign seen on the wall of the This Is Us star's home office, Ventimiglia said:

It says I Love Dean 4 Ever...I made the sign for some photograph that someone was looking for online or something. And after I made it, I just said, ‘Well, let me just hang on to this ’cause this is cool.’ And I literally just kind of stuck it right onto my Emmy notification that was hanging on my wall.

Awww! I also really enjoy a Team Dean moment, because Jess, while super smart, was not the best person, in general, and sometimes didn't treat Rory with the most respect. Also, he was incredibly dismissive of pretty much everything about Dean, including the relationship that Rory had with him, which led to many tense times between the three teens once Jess got to town and set his book-reading sights on her.

I will never be fully convinced that Jared Padalecki's Dean was truly right for Rory long-term, but when Ventimiglia was asked if putting his handwritten sign on his Emmy nomination certificate was a way to stick it to Padalecki, he clarified by saying that "Jared and I are really good friends." Well, Ventimiglia's buddy Padalecki got wind of what went down, and had a perfect response, which he posted to Instagram:

A photo posted by on

You know what? With all this love flowing back and forth between Milo Ventimiglia and Jared Padalecki, I think instead of more Gilmore Girls proper, we might need a show where Jess and Dean somehow meet up again an actually become friends. I mean, sure, by the time we saw him in A Year in the Life in 2016, Jess didn't seem to have changed that much, while Dean had married and had kids, but both seemed to still be at least a little in love with Rory. Maybe they could actually bond and bro out over that, and finally help each other to fully move on.

You can revisit all of Gilmore Girls on Netflix, while Milo Ventimiglia can been seen on NBC's This Is Us, Tuesdays at 9 p.m. EST, and Jared Padalecki is currently starring on The CW's Walker, which airs Thursdays at 9 p.m. EST.

For more to watch, you can check out our guide to early 2021 TV premieres!

Adrienne Jones
Senior Content Creator

Covering The Witcher, Outlander, Virgin River, Sweet Magnolias and a slew of other streaming shows, Adrienne Jones is a Senior Content Producer at CinemaBlend, and started in the fall of 2015. In addition to writing and editing stories on a variety of different topics, she also spends her work days trying to find new ways to write about the many romantic entanglements that fictional characters find themselves in on TV shows. She graduated from Mizzou with a degree in Photojournalism.