“Gossip Girl” (2007)
Anyone watching Gossip Girl?
Sure, the demographic of the show seems entirely teenaged, classist and synthetic but this show has become a guilty pleasure of sorts.
My thing with the show is that it’s this uncanny mash-up, patched together from disparate precedents — specifically, numerous character-types cadged from Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel franchises as well as the Cruel Intentions movie franchise of the ’90’s. Of course, Sarah Michelle Gellar circulated between both sets of properties, just as young actresses that signified her opposite number — Eliza Dushku (Faith in BtVS) made various appearances as the central blonde’s raven-haired antagonist, while Gellar was a brunette in Intentions, playing opposite Reese Whitherspoon.
What’s new in Gossip Girl is the inclusion of a new, male archetype — all of the boys on this show, look like either Joaquin Phoenix in ‘Gladiator’ or Josh Hartnett. And none of these guys seem to own a hairbrush.
The central protagonist in Gossip Girl is Serena van der Woodsen (Blake Lively) whose supermodel good looks essentially put Sarah Gellar out to pasture.
In keeping with the Whedon legacy, the girl who plays Serena’s opposite number at her Upper East Side Prep school, Blair Waldorf (Leighton Meester), is a ringer for Eliza Dushku, who played the anti-Buffy, the streetwise, riot-grrl slayer, Faith on both BtVS and it’s spin-off Angel.
As a matter of bland signification, many of the wealthy characters on the show seem to be stolen off of some fantasy-league Monopoly board — Waldorf, van der Woodsen, Archibald, Bass — while the token middle-class characters bear the frumpy names Humphey and Abrams. And then there’s one token Asian girl and one token black girl at Serena’s posh prep-school. In a city of some 8 million people, they can only make room for 2 upwardly-mobile minority students? Thanks, CW…
But of course, the show is derived from a series of 12 novels by Cecily von Ziegesar, about teenagers attending single-sex preparatory schools on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The eponymous title of the first novel refers to the omniscient narrator who sees and reports upon all of the chracters’ trial and tribulations, first and foremost that of once-troubled glamour gal Serena van der Woodsen.
The other zeitgeist that this show is mining is that of the late ’80’s and early ’90’s in terms of teenage and adult fare. These rich, spoilt, Upper East side kids are all enacting their very own ‘Dangerous Liasons‘ reparatory theater — you know, the version that starred Sarah Michelle Gellar and Ryan Phillipe and came out in 1999 under the title ‘Cruel Intentions‘? Of course, the ‘Cruel Intentions’ franchise only made three installments — with television, you can go on and on, week after week, hatching new schemes for your entertainment.
The other trend that Gossip Girl is re-creating the Marshall Herskovitz/Edward Zwick thirtysomething (1987) and Melrose Place (1992) by rescucitating the career of the now-40 Kelly Rutherford, who plays Lily van der Woodsen, mother of
Serena. Call it a passing of the blonde…
Okay, that’s a long run-on sentence but by now I’m sure you get the idea — it’s all guilty pleasure and numerous mischaracterizations about living in New York — parent Dan Humphrey operates a pre-2000 SoHo-style gallery out of Williamsburg, while the Upper East Side is characterized as some sort of super-wealthy family neighborhood and not the Septuagenarian Trust Fund neighborhood that it really is.
In a strange way, 2/3rds of this show seems to be a unintentional tribute to the ‘career of Sarah Michelle Gellar (Buffy of the aforementioned Slayer show) in that the show seems to tap her career as an inspiration for product placement and plot development. Further connections involve the recent addition of Michelle Tractenberg (formerly Buffy’s sister Dawn) as Georgina Sparks, one of Serena’s running buddies from her ‘troubled’ days.
As someone who’s spent time in Williamsburg artist subculture and the Upper East Side, I find the show’s characterization on New York both laughable and absurd. Serena’s boyfriend, Dan Humphrey has a Dad that’s ‘middle-class’, yet he’s a former artist who now shouulders the aforementioned gallery in Williamsburg. The gallery is nicer than their home,a converted garage or loft of some sort. And the Upper East Sidewhere all of the other characters reside is some sort of Californiafied Manhattan where all of the streets are wide and nobody ever even considers taking the subway or avails themselves of the city’s numerous cultural venues.
The guilty pleasure is all about watching the distortions they’ve rendered upon both wealthy New Yorkers and the city’s creative class.
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