Gossip Girl (2007 - ?)

I think by now my feelings about Gossip Girl may have come across on ye olde blogge. They are simple: I love this show. I acknowledge that it's not for everyone (though I'm still working on accepting that fact).

I had heard pretty good buzz about it when it premiered, and I kept an eye on Jacob's recaplets when the show started last fall. While channel surfing one day, I discovered that the CW was rerunning episodes Sundays at six, and I watched "Dare Devil." I was completely, horribly entranced from the word go.

I am going to confess something to you now that some people know about me, some people don't, and everyone treats like it's crazy, although I think it makes about as much sense as anything else: I watch soap operas. There was a crazy time when I was juggling four; there was a low time when my combined effort added up to one. I watch about two now. My love of soap operas is threefold: 1) only the least likely thing is allowed to happen on a soap opera, 2) they are always on, and 3) I'm something of a narrative junkie. As long as there is something to read/watch/follow that mildly holds my interest, I will do just that.

Now, what does any of this have to do with GG? It's simple really: I love it because it's so perfectly insane. It's a soap opera on mescaline. Blair (Leighton Meester, she of the impeccable instincts and questionable headbands) can lose her prized virginity to the sluttiest guy she can find (Chuck, played to such unbelievable perfection by Ed Westwick that you might lose your mind), go through a slut spiral, fall in love with Chuck, sleep with Nate (Chace Crawford, to whom we'll come back), and have a pregnancy scandal that reveals the entire sordid affair to everyone and dethrones Queen B in one fell swoop inside of seven episodes. A lesser show would draw this out for an entire season or even longer but not GG. They've got coke whores who sell their horses for blow and murder to get to before the season's out.

Before you start thinking that that is all crazy and weird and you want none of it, don't front with me. From Les Liaisons Dangerous on down, we plebes have been obsessed with what happens when you can afford to buy not only everything you need but also anything you want. All GG does every episode is look at a bunch of people who have wealth and power and say, "Now what?"

Of course, none of this would work if you couldn't believe that any human being, real or imagined, would do any of the crazy shit that goes down from week to week, and that is exactly where Josh Schwartz, Stephanie Savage, et al. got it right. Teens treat pretty much everything that happens to them as life or death, so you've got to find actors who will play things that way without ever once winking at the camera, and, in that respect, this show is perfectly cast. Perhaps even more than perfectly because everyone pretty much goes for broke all the time. When you look at a wildly crazy construct like Chuck, your instinct would be to play him for laughs (as Em said, that's what happened with some of Edward's intensity in movie-Twilight). Instead, despite the deliciously deranged get ups and the insane lines, Westwick plays him like this is what would naturally happen to you if you were brought up the way Chuck was. Somehow you find yourself thinking that yes, this is just how I would have turned out if that had happened to me.

Even when you think you can pinpoint the weak link (say, Crawford or Taylor Momsen as Jenny), if you pause to consider who that character is and who that character is supposed to be, you end up believing that someone as blank as Crawford can be plays Nate exactly the way Nate should be played. He's fiercely loyal when it comes to his family, he was raised to basically not go around embarrassing them, and everything else just sort of falls by the wayside. When he plum forgets the girl that he and Dan (Penn Badgley) had a total threeway with weeks earlier and then laughs it off, you realize that Crawford is playing it exactly right. And as for Momsen, last season was sort of touch and go, but this year she is hitting it out of the park. Jenny believes that every chance is her last chance, and Momsen plays that urgency so well that even as you are like, "Damn, Jenny, get a hold of yourself," part of you still thinks, "Shit! Make it work!"

It doesn't help that Chris and Jessica are completely obsessed with the show to the point where they renamed the tag "The Greatest Show of Our Time." Nor does it help that Jacob refers to it as the same in his philosophical, mood-altering, possibly life-changing recaps. It's hard to imagine that you could dislike anything that Jacob writes about given the way he writes. He pours so much passion and imagination into simply trying to explain to you what he sees happening and how that may or may not be exactly what's going on in your life that I think if the show went off the rails to the point where I should hate it, Jacob's recaps would completely blind me to that fact.

To be honest, as much as I want to tell you about this show I love so much, I have struggled massively not to repeat that which Jacob has already said in more detail and with a better vocabulary. Think of it this way: everyone is pretty and crazy and only the most deranged shit happens in any given episode, but it's always ground in real, accessible, believable human emotion. If anything, it's exactly the show that Heroes pretends it is.