OMFG!

If you’ll remember, in this post about Entourage, I ridicule the thought that Gossip Girl can make it past the graduation from high school of most of its main characters.

September 14’s “Reversals of Fortune” may as well have begun with credits reading: “We probably should have made them freshmen in season one, but, shucks, the success of this show surprised us as much as it surprised everyone else.”

The show then proceeded to launch into a frenzied effort to build ridiculous sub-plots that have only one purpose: to distract viewers from the fact that all of these kids are supposed to be starting at prestigious Ivy League schools next week, thereby ending the drama their day-to-day contact creates.

Serena (Blake Lively)’s big plan is to taunt her estranged father with paparazzi photos of her in innumerable compromising positions so that he’ll take her calls. Now, I’m with the rest of the world in thinking that Blake Lively may be an escapee from some lab whose purpose is to create the perfect woman, but, you know what, I just don’t see much plot potential here. And that’s too bad, because Serena was in need of some serious growth—-her character hasn’t been interesting in a very long time. But no, the writers have instead decided to rest in the easy stereotype of “daddy issues.”

Add to that a gratuitous sex plot featuring Chuck (Ed Westwick) and Blair (Leighton Meester) that reinforces a stereotypical need of women to belittle their “competition” and folks, we’ve got ourselves a R-E-A-L winner of a season.

Things Fifteen Year Olds Shouldn't Be Able to Do

Taylor Momsen scares me.

Even in Buffy there were the “adult-teens:” high school student characters played by actors in their twenties. Charisma Carpenter was twenty-seven when she started playing the fifteen year-old snob Cordelia; Nicholas Brendon was twenty-six when he played the fifteen year-old Xander; even Sarah Michelle Gellar was a few years older than her character Buffy. At some level it makes sense: the awkward, unrefined demeanor of most teens would probably make teen dramas unable to carry a wide enough demographic for commercial viability.

Gossip Girl mostly follows the casting practices of its predecessors. Leighton Meester plays an eighteen year-old Blair at twenty-two; Blake Lively is a twenty-one year-old playing the seventeen year-old Serena; Penn Badgley is a twenty-two year-old high school senior; the list goes on.

I had always assumed that Taylor Momsen, who plays the youngest principle of the fifteen year-old Jenny Humphrey, was another adult-teen. This week I was stunned to learn that the actress that portrays by the character dealing with the most adult situations on the show is the only member of the cast that is not actually an adult: she really is fifteen!

The show has taken the standard protective father vs. edgy daughter conflict staple of teen drama to a pretty dark place: Jenny has moved out in protest of her father (Matthew Settle)’s refusal to let her gallivant all over New York for the sake of fashion. This left her prey to a head-case model, Agnes (Willa Holland—nice to see that out-of-work OC actors are getting a fresh start on the CW), who reacts quite badly to Jenny’s efforts to launch her label without her participation and torches Jenny’s designs. The major snafu to the label launch is Jenny’s age: she needs a parent’s signature on the contracts. When her to efforts to blackmail her father into signing the papers in exchange for her moving back home fail, Jenny goes to the next level, promising to seek emancipation. Keep in mind that Jenny still does not have any discernible means of supporting herself. No wonder they’re currently advertising Gossip Girl as “every parent’s worst nightmare.”

For some reason, adults playing teens caught up in the psychodrama of adult situations expressed through childish relationships isn’t all that disturbing. But how convincing Momsen is in her portrayals of Jenny’s efforts to be soulless and mercenary is downright creepy. All of which begs the question: where are her real parents?

What the Yale?: A Review of October 13, 2008’s Episode of Gossip Girl, “New Haven Can Wait”

I wonder what Yale did to the CW television network. It must have been something awful. First, Privileged made one of their graduates a failed tabloid reporter turned nanny/tutor. Then the university became the object of desire for Gossip Girls gone wild. At least Serena (Blake Lively) acknowledges that “Yale is for overachieving bookworms.” Not that you’d know it from the way the university is portrayed in October 13’s “New Haven Can Wait.” Of course, as those of us from other pretentious, ivy-covered universities will quickly tell you, the episode was clearly filmed at Columbia.

Apparently, in Gossip Girl logic, a couple of photos on Page Six and walking in a fashion show on a whim can overcome a C average and almost being expelled from your fancy Manhattan prep school twice (in one season). You could almost hear the phones of Yale’s PR army ringing at 9:01 ET—the university sought out every media outlet that would listen to deny the show’s representation of their ivory tower.

To make things worse, yet again the narrative induced the strange sensation of feeling really bad for Blair (Leighton Meester): the straight A student the Dean finds too boring for his special get-together. But don’t get used to the feeling, the sympathy is dialed back a bit when B blackmails the dean’s assistant, crashes the gathering, and exposes Serena’s role in the accidental overdose of a would-be one night stand (“boring” is measured on a whole different scale on this show). Despite all this scheming, poor B still isn’t offered early admission because she’s not hip enough to turn around Yale’s stuffy image and the show ends with the now familiar, contrived “frenemy” moment between B and S that’s really starting to grate on this season. And, curiously, the show itself seemed to point out this decline: if Blair already feels like "Darth Vader next to Sunshine Barbie" when she’s with Serena, where can it possibly go from here?

Gossip Girl airs on the CW network Mondays at 8 pm.

Since When Do We Like Blair?

Wow. Serena (Blake Lively) gets unfairly blamed for burning off the hair of Dan (Penn Badgley)’s new girlfriend, and ten seconds later she goes from the put-upon upper eastside maven unfairly burdened with gorgeous blonde hair, mile-long legs, and an inconceivable fortune to the face of pure over-privileged, under-parented teenage evil. Turns out she really was that simple.

Blair (Leighton Meester)’s self-loathing was a background theme to last season, but all the elements were put into play: her bulimia, her father’s abandonment, her mother (Margaret Colin)’s willingness to throw her under a bus to further her career, the list went on and on. And yet she was just so vile that no one cared. We watched her cronies throw yogurt on her when she passed them at school, and it did nothing but make us feel a little bit better about the standards of teenage girls (even the mean ones). Turns out fashion does nothing to beautify sociopathy.

But with Serena gone glamurderous, sympathetic viewers need an object. Suddenly poor, dejected Blair, whose mother still seems to prefer every dysfunctional teen girl she comes in contact with over her own daughter, looks a little more… well, normal. And hey, she did eventually forgive Serena for sleeping with her boyfriend. We watch as Blair gets thwarted at every attempt to win her friends back by, her mother, the once thought vanquished Jenny Humphrey, and… Serena. It’s hard not to feel bad for the kid.

And then it gets laid on her. Serena has one of those “Gee… I really seem to be pissing everyone off right now. Maybe it’s me” moments that Gossip Girl writers have been so good at cooking up for her. She feels marginally bad that, yet again, Eleanor Waldorf has decided to use her daughter’s best friend to model her designs, instead of her equally beautiful but slightly more conservative (Blair doesn’t appear to do coke like Serena used to) own daughter. But fortunately Poppy, the new it-girl that has taken Serena as her sidekick, has the solution. Poppy says that sisterhood is way over-rated. Particularly when you have sisters with self-esteem issues. Serena agrees and tells Blair to feel worse about herself.

When Jenny gives Blair a pep-talk in : “You might be privileged Blair, but you’ve worked for every single thing you achieved. Just like me.” This just before she announces that she’s quitting her fancy prep school to become an unpaid fashion intern high-school drop-out. Don’t worry B, all is not lost!

I’m not willing to read this show for much more than it is: the latest teen psychodrama fueled by our wanting to peep in on life without meaningful financial restrictions. But there is an unspoken heroine of Gossip Girl: Serena’s mother, Lily van der Woodsen-Bass-would-be-Humphrey (Kelly Rutherford). The newest revelation that she posed for a Magelthorpe nude portrait is the latest piece of a puzzle that’s a revealing a woman in charge of her sexuality, who doesn’t care what other people think, and wants to instill the same in her children. It’s too bad that she likes money so much that she stays married to a man that treats her like one of his many possessions. But on this series, only time can tell…