Gossip Girl Review

Kongye has taken quite a long hiatus from real blogging. But with tonight's premiere of Gossip Girl on The CW, we feel a deadline approaching. Kongye actually did attend the CW pilot screenings, so when we say horrible things about these pilots, we are doing so with some level of expertise.

I’m going to devote an entry to Gossip Girl. There are a bunch of reasons for that. First, I am faced with an overwhelming amount of hype for it right now. My mailbox is being invaded by the show this week. When Us Weekly arrived Monday (3 days late- the nerve of them), I was met with a glowing full-page review in the TV section. This morning my copy of Time Out New York arrived, featuring almost 10 pages of Gossip Girl-inspired content. A quick glance reveals the content is less inspired by the content of the show than by its PR team. It’s staring at me from the top of my AIM window. Blog partner Phallic pointed out that Perez and Gawker have tons of GG branding. I am being blitzed, and it feels personal. All this stalking is almost enough to erase the good will the pilot built up- almost.

That brings us to my review. Let me preface this by saying that Gossip Girl is the kind of show that you can instantly tell if you’ll like based on your reaction to its description. Basically, it’s The O.C. on the UES. That being said, I didn’t like The O.C.- mostly because I don’t like Juicy Couture, bad boys in pukka shells and wife beaters, whiny geeks, or anything with even a hint of California. This show did get me, though. It’s painfully predictable. The only thing unexpected is how boring the “revelations” and “twists” are. That’s her big secret that made her leave New York? Wasn’t that made obvious about 30 seconds into the pilot? Did any of the characters not know? I can’t possibly justify why I like this show. It will be my televised equivalent of Popeye’s Chicken. It’s so far beyond guilty pleasure, the only way to characterize it is lethal. I could actually feel my body shutting down as I watched this.

[Possible Spoiler Warning]
I think the best way to review this is to go through the characters.

My favourite is Cumface. If it weren’t for Dirty Sexy Money’s Evil Priest, Cumface might be my favourite new character in primetime this year. I affectionately call him that because he’s always got the grunting, distorted features you’d see in an average man’s cumface. I suppose in that sense this actor is perfectly cast. In their review, Us Weekly says his “sexual aggressively in the premiere may be off-putting to some viewers.” I say that despite constantly being surrounded by a harem of willing skanks, Cumface still tries to rape 2 of the main characters in the pilot. In fact it seems to be a running theme that when any character finds out he’s alone with a girl their reaction is “Oh, he’s going to rape her” with varying degrees of concern. In fact, when the Tokens see him taking his second potential victim upstairs, they roll their eyes and giggle knowingly. Cumface is clearly a manifestation of the producers’ own bitterness towards the popular guys in their high schools. They like to imagine that the only way guys like him can get laid is to take it forcibly. Unfortunately the writing is so bad and the situations so ridiculous that’s more like The Continental than a real threat. His techniques are amazing. After getting a girl drunk, luring her to an abandoned kitchen, and all but getting her to promise him sex, he decides he doesn’t want her to willingly have sex with him. How else to explain the fact that he tells her that he watched her have sex with her best friend’s boyfriend and that he’ll tell everyone unless she sleeps with him? I know voyeurism and extortion are huge turn-ons for me! I can’t wait to see how he follows up a fine week of lechery.

The two main characters are Serena and Blair. They are clearly going to the new role models for young girls in need of strong, intelligent women to look up to. In the pilot we learn a lot about the decision-making of these girls. We learn that Serena left home for a year to go to boarding school because she got drunk and screwed her best friend’s boyfriend in an empty hotel bar while Cumface watched. If I ever did something I didn’t want anyone to find out about, the first thing I’d do is attract an enormous amount of attention to myself by moving to another state without warning. But wait, Serena didn’t tell anyone she was moving, so clearly no one was going to notice she had disappeared, right? Oh, is that not how it works? Serena lives in the hotel owned by Cumface’s family. She enjoys getting shitfaced in the hotel’s bar. Apparently she also loves truffle oil (her favourite food is grilled cheese sandwiches made with truffle oil. The writers were trying so hard to show the average 12-year-old sophisticated New York food that they could relate to), She loves truffle oil so much that she agrees to go into an abandoned kitchen with Cumface to some even though he makes it quite clear what he expects as payment for the sandwich.
Blair isn’t much better. The pilot episode highlights the fact that she’s a virgin. Mind you, she’s not a virgin because she’s waiting for the right guy or for a deep love, she’s waiting to give it up to her boyfriend in order to use it as a way to get him to want her more than Serena. Her inability to close the deal throughout the pilot is pretty much indicative of how pathetic this character is. If she wasn’t the secondary female lead, and didn’t have a fantastic wardrobe, she really wouldn’t be worth mentioning. She’s less interesting than everyone else on the screen.
The boyfriend the two girls fight over is so boring I’ve already forgotten him entirely. Serena has a brother. In the pilot he’s just tried to kill himself. My first instinct was that he was gay. Then there was a scene at a store with Serena, her love interest, his little sister, and the little brother that set up a possible pairing for the young ’uns. Now I’m wavering between the brother ending up with the little sister or the forgettable boyfriend. I’m rooting for the latter. That’s pretty much the only way the boyfriend would be interesting.
Serena’s big love interest in the pilot is Penn Badgley. He is the only person I feel deserving of having his actual name here. Penn’s never been in anything good; but for some reason I still really root for him. Frequently I want his shows to be cancelled; but for him to somehow not be fired. Good news is I don’t think this is getting cancelled. He’s also the best male character on the show. He’s being compared to Cumface and the guy who may as well not exist; but it’s still kind of an accomplishment. His character has a little sister. She’s supposed to likable and represent the audience or something. In the pilot she just came off as the most naïve, helpless creature you could imagine. She is Cumface’s other victim; but unlike Serena, she needs to be rescued from him. That’s probably because after the first time he makes unwanted advances towards her, she accepts champagne from him and lets him take her up to the roof. This is despite texting “help me” to her brother. For a while we thought she was Gossip Girl; but she’s have to be at least semi-literate for that to work.
Finally, I want to argue a little more with Us Weekly. They criticize the show for not being diverse. Clearly they are racists who were choosing to ignore all the color on their screens. The Tokens (pictured above in typical situations) appear in almost all the group scenes. They do typical ethnic things like stand on either side of the female lead and look sassy and hang all over rich assholes (the one visible in the picture above is probably texting “me love you long time” to Cumface). They may not speak or have names; but they are integral to the show.

Final verdict:
This show will be the CW’s flagship for however long they can keep a reasonable percentage of this cast on the payroll.

Would I Watch It: As if you couldn’t tell from my high praise; I will be watching this show every week, I'm rewatching the pilot tonight, and I’ll be blogging it here.