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Gossip Girl

Editorial Review

Editorial Review

With the opening sequence playing out to the song Young Folks by Peter, Bjorn and John, you quickly come to understand that Gossip Girl is going to be a show about, well, young folks. It's a catchy pop song with dreamy overtones, and lyrics that were seemingly written for a show exactly like this.

Gossip Girl revolves around a clique of very well-off teens on Manhattan's Upper East Side and the anonymous blogger, Gossip Girl, who reports all the things that go on in that little echelon of humanity.

In this pilot episode we are introduced to former 'it' girl Serena van der Woodsen (Blake Lively), who is spotted arriving back at New York's Grand Central Station after a self-imposed exile at a boarding school in Connecticut. We're then introduced to all the main players in this little soap opera: Serena's former best friend Blair Waldorf (Leighton Meester), the current queen of the school; Nate Archibald (Chace Crawford), Blair's boyfriend who has a thing for Serena; middle-class brother and sister Dan (Penn Badgley) and Jenny Humphrey (Taylor Momsen); and school creep Chuck Bass (Ed Westwick).

It is suitably cheesy and rife with cliches, as teen dramas tend to be, and although it's far from the best drama on television, it does prove worthy of its guilty pleasure status.

Gossip Girl premieres on the Nine Network on Wednesday, December 3, at 10:30pm.

Patrick Tangye, November 2008

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