Juicy Cliches Fuel CW’s ‘Gossip Girl’
By Glenn Garvin, The Miami Herald
Sep. 19–Gossip Girl. 9-10 tonight on WSFL-CW 39.
The school zero, scarcely able to believe he’s gotten a date with the campus social queen he just met: “You’d really go out with some guy you don’t know?” Says she: “You can’t be worse than the guys I do know.” Welcome to the tawdry, tantalizing and altogether terrific world of Gossip Girl.
The social butterflies at a prep school in Manhattan’s Upper East Side pull one another’s wings off in this cross-generational soap based on the books by Cecily von Ziegesar. The big battle is between Serena — once the school’s It Girl, just back from a sudden and an unexplained absence of many months — and her former lieutenant, Blair, now the top dogette.
But practically everybody (including the parents) is poised to plunge a designer dagger into someone else’s back in this madly competitive swirl of social and sexual musical chairs. There are so many players, you need a score card, which in this case is provided by a secretive but ubiquitous blogger known only as Gossip Girl, who seems to know everybody’s next move even before they do.
If this sounds a little bit like an East Coast version of The O.C., it’s because both shows were created by producer Josh Schwartz. He’s painting the same picture on a different canvas: kids moving too fast, parents too preoccupied or morally crippled to help, all of it observed by outsiders desperate to make it in a rich kid’s world. Cliches, certainly, but Schwartz spins them so creatively, with characters so engaging (or mustache-twirlingly villainous), that the show is irresistible.
Blake Lively (The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants) plays the reformed party princess Serena; Leighton Meester (Entourage) the wary and vengeful Blair, and Penn Badgley (John Tucker Must Die) and Taylor Momsen (Underdog) the middle-class brother and sister Dan and Jenny, who can’t break into the clique. Speaking of cliques, the voice of the unseen Gossip Girl is that of Kristen Bell, the socially outre teenage detective of Veronica Mars. Now we know what would have happened if Nancy Drew had a blog.
More Reviews: See Tropical Life, Page 2E
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