Gossip Girl

In an attempt to tap into the zeitgeist of today's teenagers, I took it upon myself to watch, in it's entirety, the first season of the teen soap opera Gossip Girl, which airs on the CW network. That the cast is full of attractive young actresses did not have anything to do with this. And today is opposite day.

I must admit that, like most soap operas, I hated myself for actually getting involved in the characters. Like junk food, it has little nutrional value but it can be very tasty, full of the usual unbelievable twists and turns that soap operas have. But I found myself rooting for some of the characters, and hoping against hope that Dan and Serena wouldn't break up.

The most fun of Gossip Girl is peeling back the lid and analyzing it on other levels. For one thing, it is useful for anthropological reasons. The show centers on old-monied debutantes of New York's Upper East Side, and their rituals are as alien to me as those of the Hottentots. From all I've read, the depiction of these kids is fairly accurate, which is hair-raising, considering all of the underage drinking they do. They get ferried from door to door in limos, and when feeling blue may take their father's private jet to Monaco. Shows about the impossibly rich are always catnip to us because we love to see them suffer.

Then there's the employment of modern technology. The title character is a blogger, known only as Gossip Girl (and voiced by Kristen Bell), who narrates the action. This ties into the world of teenagers today, who can be bullied on social networking sites, and offers an insight into the complicated social world of teenage girls. I'm sure that the scenes in which girls make social faux pas and then are ruined for sport are disturbingly accurate. The use of cell phones and text messaging devices is also key to the storylines--it's unimaginable that this show could have existed before the advent of the use of them.

But the show wouldn't succeed if the viewer didn't care about the characters beyond wanting to see them machine-gunned to death, and I have to hand it to the writers, who take the privileged, selfish, vain characters and actually give them some depth--not much, but just enough to make it interesting.

The show centers around six characters, who all attend a fancy private school. The two main characters are Serena van der Woodson (Blake Lively), who as the show begins is returning from a mysterious stint in boarding school. Her friend and foil is Blair Waldorf (Leighton Meester), the queen bee of the girls in school and a spoiled, pampered princess. Serena and Blair, over the course of the season, go from being friends to enemies to back again. Blair's boyfriend is Nate Archibald (Chace Crawford), who is a pretty but vacuous boy who is pushed around by his overbearing father (he shares a name with basketball player Nate "Tiny" Archibald, which seems to be a coincidence, but a delicious one). Nate's best friend is Chuck Bass (Ed Westwick), the bad boy of the group, who seems to be modeled on the Ryan Phillippe character in Cruel Intentions.

Then there are Dan Humphrey (Penn Badgley) and his younger sister, Jenny (Taylor Momsen). They live in Brooklyn, attend the school on scholarship, and are the children of a faded rock star. Dan is basically the viewer's entree into the world of the rich, as he experiences their bizarre rites with the same amount of confusion as we do. When he begins dating his long-time crush Serena, he can't believe his good luck, but learns that getting involved with her kind requires a certain amount of sacrifice.

As with all soap operas, there are certain cliches that we just accept, such as that the kids seem to be constantly running into each other, a character who has tried to kill himself seems to be the sanest person in the cast, and that some of the parents seem to be far too young to have kids that old (as with shows like Beverly Hills 90210, the main cast look too old to be playing seventeen-year-olds, though Momsen, at fourteen, was exactly the age of the character she was playing). Crises are wrapped up quickly before the next one starts, and grudges are held for only as long as they are dramatically needed.

The cast is appealing, but I don't know if any of them will break out beyond this sort of thing. Lively has a past in films, and Badgley could have a future in them, as he is the most dynamic performer in the group, playing the most articulate character. Westwick is good also, but I couldn't get past how much he looks like Jimmy Fallon.

The best thing about the show is that once a viewer gets to know the characters, they mostly remain true to themselves, and there is a certain amount of loyalty among them. A plot involving Michelle Trachtenburg as a girl from Serena's past trying to wreck her future was wrapped up satisfyingly, as Blair and Chuck teamed up to help. Here I was, a forty-nine-year-old single straight man, watching and rooting for the bitch to get her comeuppance.