Gossip Girl

Gossip Girl went from being in on the joke to being the punchline


[...]
Earlier in the show’s run, Schwartz said he took on Gossip Girl because he “liked the idea of doing a show like this at The CW, at a time where there weren’t a lot of these kind of shows out there. It reminded me of the glory days of The WB when I was in college… Those early years of Dawson’s Creek, Felicity, Buffy, that whole period of stuff.” [...]

I remember being a teenager extremely vividly, and the emotional traits of being a teenager are universal regardless of where you grew up or how much money you had. And so it’s an opportunity to continue to tell those stories, get to relive those years for myself and maybe make amends or do things I didn’t have the cojones to do at the time.

Those universal emotions made a pop-culture phenomenon out of a teen show about spoiled high-schoolers whose every move was tracked by an omniscient gossip blogger. With its cast members booking magazine covers and the series earning accolades from the press, Gossip Girl brought a critically acclaimed new series to a fledgling broadcast outfit that lacked a serious sense of identity. It created a brand for The CW, at a time when the network was still little more than the combined ruins of The WB and UPN (and before it was TV’s go-to home for genre fare). It was cheekily dubbed “the Greatest Show of Our Time” and “the Greatest Teen Drama of All Time” by New York magazine. [...]

Despite Schwartz’s belief that Gossip Girl was a love letter to the teen dramas of the past, the show actually stuck out because it wasn’t like most teen dramas. It was dangerous and sexy and scandalous—and it was aware of these characteristics. Gossip Girl put on an air of maturity unseen in its genre since the reign of Beverly Hills, 90210’s Dylan McKay. Even in the pilot, the kids didn’t need fake IDs to drink alcohol at the bars of their family’s hotels. And they weren’t having secret parties with red Solo cups, either—they openly imbibed in front of their parents, and that was that. This is where The CW standard of staging a weekly event was born, with episodes dedicated to annual brunches, white parties, fashion shows, or even parties thrown on a whim to impress others. It’s a pattern that even genre shows like The Vampire Diaries have maintained.

Gossip Girl depicted its characters’ excessive power and wealth as a double-edged sword, but it still cast their Upper East Side ecosystem in an aspirational light, thanks to the audience surrogates in the Humphrey family. [...] There were no “very special” episodes, and when a character learned a lesson, it wasn’t one they learned for good. The show was covered in “white people problems,” as every possible dilemma the Upper East Siders encountered could be solved with money, status, and a little bit of charm. Whether it was a hand-waved attempted rape or stealing a dress worth five figures from the home of a “friend,” the characters of Gossip Girl did nothing on a small scale.

But that was the appeal. They were desperate for love (from their parents or their significant others), they still wanted to get into college (of their choice or their parents’ choice), but none of it had the intimacy of a Dawson’s Creek. Decadence on the outside but honesty on the inside worked well for The O.C., and that was Gossip Girl’s motto, too—only intensified.

While promoting Gossip Girl and Chuck, Schwartz reflected on The O.C.’s early days: “We were blowing through stories as fast as can be, which is what I think made that first season so much fun.” But that’s also what hurt The O.C. after its first season: Doing too much, too soon in the span of 27 episodes meant that each subsequent season had enormous expectations to live up to or surpass. (They never did, even in the return-to-form fourth season.) History repeated itself with Gossip Girl, which achieved in 18 episodes of a strike-shortened first season what The O.C. did in 27. Those episodes provided astonishing moment after astonishing moment, whether it was Blair losing her virginity to show villain Chuck Bass (Ed Westwick) in the back of his limo, or Serena’s explanation for why she previously left New York, straining her friendship with Blair and setting up her series-premiere homecoming: She “killed someone.”

What made all of these moments worth it, however, was the fact that these morally questionable characters had a code: They were intensely loyal to their own. Following Serena’s confession, Blair, Chuck, and Blair’s ex-boyfriend/Chuck’s best friend Nate Archibald (Chace Crawford) rally around their friend:

You can tell us anything. We don’t judge. We’re the non-judging Breakfast Club. We’re your best friends. Anything you do is something we do too.

It was a moment of true acceptance in a world where everything is all about exclusion and self-obsession. Yes, this code was often exercised to the detriment of other characters—the Humphreys, any perceived outsider—but it was a code nonetheless. As the show progressed, that code translated to a Gossip Girl mission statement, turning everyone into a bulletproof “monster.” Ultimately, it became a big part of the show’s downfall.

Before the second season even began, Gossip Girl’s purported earnestness was already in the rearview. The show had officially become a “guilty pleasure,” getting people talking with the decadent and sinful lifestyles of its central teenagers. And Gossip Girl—both the show and its eponymous blogger/narrator—knew that you were “nobody until you’re talked about.” Thus season one’s “OMFG” promos and the print and outdoor advertisements that preceded season two, which juxtaposed pearl-clutching reactions to the series with provocative stills of Lively and company. The campaigns got people talking, but they were out of line with Josh Schwartz’s vision. “The network came up with that, and I just stood back,” Schwartz told New York Magazine. “When you drive by a poster for your show and it says, ‘Every parent’s nightmare,’ you have mixed feelings.” As Schwartz began to shift his focus to Chuck, Stephanie Savage took the reins at Gossip Girl, which—in a case of déjà vu—now had to be bigger and better than it was the year before. The season opened with a summer vacation in which Chuck and Dan slept with every woman in sight, Serena was pretending to date Nate, Nate was having an affair with an older woman (Mädchen Amick), and Blair was dating an English noble.

It was an instant return to a world of chaos, and it did not stop. Nate’s older woman eventually started paying him for sex and threatened to send his father to prison if he tried to end their arrangement; once class was in session, Dan had an affair with his English teacher, officially winning teen-drama bingo with one of the genre’s most overused tropes. [...]

By the final season of Gossip Girl, the show had started something that it intended to finish, and it had 10 episodes to do so. “People always talk about endgames, but the thing is, if you have have a firm ending set in stone, everything you write runs into that wall,” Joshua Safran said prior to the sixth season. “It has to be done with a shifting, malleable approach.” Safran had left for Smash following season five, so Stephanie Savage took charge once more. Viewership for the season premiere hit an all-time low, even as the series spoke of how the latest answer to the Gossip Girl mystery “would be a major media coup.” The audience members who remained were going to learn who Gossip Girl really was—whether they cared or not.

On December 17, 2012, the reveal finally occurred—and the show was ushered into the same realm of controversial series finales occupied by How I Met Your Mother, Dexter, and St. Elsewhere. No, it wasn’t all a dream, nor did Chuck Bass become a lumberjack—but the finale featured a couple of weddings, Lisa Loeb, and the revelation that Dan Humphrey (with a little help from his sister Jenny) was Gossip Girl the whole time. Except for when Georgina and Serena were Gossip Girl.

At that moment, “Gossip Dan” memes were born, and the time spent getting to know and investing in the characters of Gossip Girl was rendered into an absolute joke. The reveal didn’t make sense within the context of the series, and it didn’t make sense in the context of the season that was building up to it, either. [...]

Penn Badgley went from being known for being in Gossip Girl to being known for being Gossip Girl, and even he was confused by the decision. “I have to bite my tongue there,” he said while discussing the finale in 2013. “The end was strange for me, for all of us. Because the characters did all end up together. That has been my problem with television—you start with something real, and it eventually becomes, against all odds, ‘How do these six people still hang out every day?’ It’s fucking crazy. It’s impossible. I mean, those six people—why do they even keep hanging out? Because they have to, because they’re on a show. So you start to figure out these asinine ways to keep them all together.” Six seasons in, the intensely loyal dynamic between Gossip Girl’s main characters no longer made any sense; the show failed to maintain its “universal” emotional traits as well.

Even on a ratings anemic network like The CW, making it to 100 episodes is no easy task, let alone 121 episodes. But Gossip Girl did it—it just grew further and further away from its original vision in doing so. Sonia Saraiya’s series finale review for The A.V. Club noted that despite it being “an episode that had two weddings, a death, and the long-awaited unveiling of the gossip girl herself,” the episode was “excruciatingly boring.” In trading in an earnest story for a scandalous one, the show ultimately became neither, as the show’s need for everything to be shocking made it so that it was no longer shocking. That “non-judging Breakfast Club” mentality remained, however, only in the most warped possible way: In that finale, Serena referred to Dan’s years torturing and stalking his friends, acquaintances, and family as Gossip Girl as his “love letter” to all of them. A show that was at one time self-aware in how awful its characters could be ultimately became complacent in that, and in that way, it was a fitting ending to what Gossip Girl had become. The show that Josh Schwartz had made—that show that reminded him of “the glory days of The WB”—had gone the way of The WB long before the finale.

Gossip Girl Co-Creator Josh Schwartz on the Enduring Romantic Legacy of Chuck Bass and Blair Waldorf


Their romance wasn’t planned when the show was initially being written.
“None of that was expected. Chuck came into the show as the villain. But it’s one of those great, fun things about making a television series — it’s an evolving, living, breathing thing, and things can easily change on a whim. You get an actor like Ed Westwick and see the chemistry he had with Leighton Meester, and their scenes just crackled. So it felt like, here are two people who are bonded by their mutual scheming and the dark side of the show, at least from the beginning, and that would naturally evolve into a romantic relationship. One that was fraught and often conflict-laden, but ultimately incredibly romantic and fulling for both the characters and the audience. They came into the show as very different kinds of roles, but the chemistry between them took over.”

Despite their tumultuous courtship, they were always built to last.
“When we went into each season, we asked what could be done with these core relationships — we have Dan and Serena, we have Chuck and Blair — at the center of the show. You can challenge them, you can put them with other people. Obviously we put Blair and Dan together, which was for some people the best thing they’ve ever seen and for some people it was absolutely antithetical to everything they wanted from those characters. And that’s also the fun of it. But the plan for Chuck and Blair was always a ‘long-term play’ once we saw that chemistry, in the same way that Dan and Serena were — as much as we were going to break these people apart, and earn their way back into these other’s lives. In a way, that love story between those two characters was always one of the overarching stories of the whole show, and we knew that. As far as we pushed them, we always had to be able to find a way to bring them back together.”

Sono d'accordo anche con l'articolo di EW che osserva il cuore antico dello show malgrado i cellulari e i blog (i matrimoni pseudocombinati!)

Yep, se penso che ho recuperato le prime due stagioni di GG su megavideo e i suoi 72 minuti di visione :')

La critica a Chuck per me trova il tempo che trova, sono sempre stata una fan Chair sfegatata ma non penso a loro come il modello della coppia perfetta, così come pur amando tantissimo Blair so che se l'avessi incontrata nella vita reale l'avrei odiata con tutto il cuore, e con lei il resto della baracca xD Non so perchè nell'AD 2017 sia ancora necessario specificare che ciò che piace in un'opera di fiction non riflette i nostri valori o preferenze o altro nella vita reale, ma eccoci qui.

Gossip Girl ha contribuito tantissimo a migliorare il mio inglese ngl

Non so se oggi mi farebbero lo stesso effetto, ma le prime due stagioni mi erano sembrate abbastanza coerenti, dalla terza in poi c'è stata una character assassination generale

Kristina Cohen accusa Ed Westwick di 'Gossip Girl' di averla stuprata. Lui risponde

In un lungo post su Facebook l'attrice racconta di una sera in cui fu invitata a cena a casa insieme al fidanzato produttore e venne abusata. Ma Westwick replica: "Non la conosco"

L'attrice Kristina Cohen in un lungo post su Facebook ha denunciato il collega Ed Westwick, star della serie Gossip Girl ma anche nel cast di titoli cinematografici importanti come J.Edgar e I figli degli uomini, di violenza.

[...] Nel suo post Kristina racconta che era stata invitata a cena a casa dell'attore insieme ad un produttore che frequentava all'epoca e che dopo che Ed Westwick aveva proposto a lei e il produttore di fare sesso tutti insieme, lei aveva chiesto di andarsene perché si sentiva a disagio, ma il fidanzato produttore non voleva indisporre l'attore e disse a Kristina di rimanere per la cena e che sarebbero andati via dopo poco. La invitarono ad andarsi a fare un sonnellino nella stanza degli ospiti dove poi l'attore venne a violentarla. L'attrice racconta che il fidanzato produttore la fece sentire in colpa in seguito dicendo che era stata sua responsabilità. "È stato un incubo e i giorni dopo non sono andati meglio".

Westwick, da parte sua, nega tutto. Attraverso Instagram ga fatto sapere che "non conosco questa persona. Non ho mai 'forzato' mai nessuna donna in alcun modo e certamente non ho mai commesso una violenza sessuale".