And matter most.
That is the essence of “Gossip Girl,” a semisatirical portrait of power and privilege in the private schools and penthouses of New York’s ultra rich. It is often said that Hollywood is “high school with money.” On this glossy, glamour-soaked CW series, high school is better than Hollywood.
“Gossip Girl” explores the unnavigability of friendship. Female bonding is punctuated by the joy and disappointments of dating, but the ruling passion is power: the pride that comes with connecting with one’s ilk and asserting control, as well as the scorching pain of rejection and ridicule. Sex is easy; it’s the cliques that take time and solicitude.
“You can tell us anything,” Blair coos to a distraught Serena, who is hung over and harboring a shameful secret. “We’ve seen you with vomit in your hair, making out with investment bankers in the men’s room at P. J. Clarke’s.”
In a culture obsessed with youth, money and appearance, 16 is the new 30, and teenage girls’ discontent about boys and clothes and one another has resonance even for older audiences. Parents fret that youngsters grow up too fast; children complain that grown-ups refuse to grow old.
“Gossip Girl” goes further than most shows in depicting the excesses of the rich and under-age (in this fantasy teenagers are never carded), but most of all it represents the next evolutionary stage of girl power television after “Sex and the City.” That pioneering HBO series, and the movie version, celebrates girlish women who joined forces — “Us against the world” — in the pursuit of success and happiness.
“Gossip Girl” focuses on worldly little girls who join forces against one another. The series, along with such like-minded shows as the MTV semireality show “The Hills” and a cautionary senior edition, “The Real Housewives of New York City,” are focused on friends, and most of all on frenemies. They are so postfemininist that they circle back not just to “Mean Girls,” but to the pre-Friedan era of Clare Boothe Luce and Rona Jaffe.
It’s not actually a step backward of course; it’s more of a mischievous sidestep, a zig after many years of networks’ zagging to catch up with “Sex and the City.” That series’s selling point was not just sex and designer clothes. It offered the charisma of four stylish, sexy women taking on Manhattan like D’Artagnan and the Three Musketeers (Moschinoteers, in this case). None of the imitations, including “Cashmere Mafia,” a flop on ABC, and NBC’s slightly more successful version, “Lipstick Jungle,” adequately captured the playful, loving tone of the original.
“Gossip Girl” reversed course and found a way saucily to make a virtue of vacuity and viciousness. It’s better to reign in hell than serve in heaven, especially on a soap opera.
Not that “Gossip Girl,” which is based on a popular book series for young adults by the same name, is a nighttime soap exactly. For one thing, real soap operas like “The Young and the Restless,” or even the Fox drama “The OC,” which ended last year, revolve around love and betrayal, not BFF status and its discontents. “Gossip Girl” borrows the rituals and tempestuous dialogue of the soap opera genre and puts it to a Facebook beat. — Excerpted from “What Are Friends For? Power and Pain,” a Times review of the series, by Alessandra Stanley, May 18, 2008. The full review is below, in the “Highlights” section.
