Sunday, September 23rd, 2007
04:00 Gossip Girl
Gossip Girl. Episode 1. Try as I might, all I could do while watching Gossip Girl was compare it to Greek. Both shows focus on a group of teenagers, and there's a lot of power plays and back-stabbing in both. But Greek is a lot of fun and Gossip is tedious.
Serena arrives back amid the rich teens of Manhattan's Upper East Side, having been mysteriously away for a year. Her best friend now hates her, the best friend's boyfriend is in love with her, so is The School Outsider, the school bad-guy tries to rape her, the Outsider's Kid Sister bonds with her, and her own brother tried to commit suicide. Oh, yeah, and the parents have history, too.
It's a mess of teen TV clichés. And it has none of the depth or sense of fun of a typical episode of Greek. When several girls gang up on Serena and act all 'meow' with her, it's as painfully boring as every other scene in the episode. Over on Greek, the exact same scene would have been equal parts funny and insightful. Not so here.
It's a good cast, but they are going through the motions. They don't devour the scenes the way the actresses do on Greek. They are merely re-enacting the sort of stuff they, themselves, watched on TV while growing up. But, doing it without really understanding it. This cast should down and watch Greek or Hidden Palms.
Picking one thing that I hated more than any other would be difficult, but I think I will go for the character of the bad-guy (the potential rapist) who is written as black as black can be. He is relentlessly evil. Every line of dialogue drives home the fact, with the subtlety of the exposition on the Bionic Woman pilot.
I left the pilot caring not about the characters, nor the world they inhabit. A sharp contrast to the Hidden Palms pilot, which was also about idle rich kids, but was - in fact - a heck of a lot of fun to watch.
Gossip Girl
