Josh Schwartz, creator of “The OC,” is an executive producer and writer of “Gossip Girl,” and helped turn it into an East Coast version of that other show: “The EC.” It’s a sleek, glossy, musically enhanced soap opera centered on wealthy, gorgeous high school students who connive and cavort to the sound of Rihanna,
Justin Timberlake, Peter Bjorn and John, Angels & Airwaves, and Timbaland.
The television version does not violate the books’ basic principles: The anonymous Gossip Girl is an unseen narrator (
Kristen Bell, “Veronica Mars”) who blogs about the movements and misdeeds of Serena (
Blake Lively), her B.F.F. Blair (
Leighton Meester) and other friends as they drink, smoke pot and hook up at trendy clubs.
But the CW adaptation pumps up the importance of parents, particularly Rufus, father to Dan (Penn Badgley) and Jenny (Taylor Momsen), middle-class Brooklyn kids who chafe beneath the scorn of their more glamorous classmates. In the novels Rufus is a minor figure, a scraggily failed poet with bad hygiene; here he is played by Matthew Settle as a former rock musician with romantic problems of his own, including a history with Serena’s snobby mother.
The blending of adult and teenage story lines was crucial to “The OC,” but here it is a glaring violation of the genre.
“Gossip Girl,” along with similar series like “The A-List” and “The Clique,” is Mean Girl lit, mass-market paperbacks that put “Sex and the City” in a teenage context, with lots of sex and erotic brand names like Prada, Absolut and St. Barts.
And while these works are often criticized as a devolution from Judy Blume’s coming-of-age novels, they are actually closer to children’s literature. Like “Peter Pan,” “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” or the “
Harry Potter” series, these novels are fantasies and projections of an imaginary world where parents are dead or peripheral, and lost boys and girls struggle on their own with good and evil, or in this case, Bergdorf Goodman and evil.
Even the characters’ names — Blair Waldorf and Serena van der Woodsen — are as fancifully evocative as those found in children’s books, like Willy Wonka in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” or the candy magnate Lord Skrumshus in “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,”
Ian Fleming’s novel for children. (Fleming, whose spy James Bond met up with one Pussy Galore, never quite outgrew that name game.)
Parents matter on “Gossip Girl,” and their negligence veins the narrative as if to explain their children’s excesses. CW specializes in young-adult television, and certain public-trust habits are hard to break, like enriching spoiled, bratty characters with poignant back stories to make them more sympathetic — or justifiable to media monitoring groups like the Parents Television Council.
Oh, and also, Serena and Blair don’t smoke cigarettes. It is an odd crick in our culture that a show geared toward younger viewers will depict minors drinking alcohol and doing illegal drugs, but draw the line at cigarettes. Good citizens complain about the power of the tobacco lobby in Washington, but in Hollywood it seems that the anti-tobacco lobby is stronger, and even more intimidating to industry executives than Mothers Against Drunk Driving, or for that matter, the federal
Drug Enforcement Administration.
The show even assigns Serena, back from boarding school under mysterious circumstances, a younger brother who attempted suicide and is misunderstood by all but his caring, if troubled, sister. (In the novels he is older, at Yale and an object of female lust, not psychotherapy.)
Children’s book protagonists skirt past private wounds; they are too busy exploring Narnia or Neverland and fending off witches, pirates and Indian chiefs — or hostile saleswomen at Bendel’s.
Only adult fiction indulges the grown-up delusion that children are interested in their parents’ personal lives.
The mothers and fathers in “Gossip Girl” novels like “Because I’m Worth It” and “Nothing Can Keep Us Together” are peripheral figures, shallow socialites, divorcées and Wall Street tycoons who provide credit cards, neglect and a few bare-bones plot points, much the way Mr. Darling’s decision to chain Nana, the nanny watchdog, in the yard gave Peter Pan his chance to fly away with Wendy and the boys.
That “Gossip Girl” novels have no underlying moral lesson is exactly the point; the tale of Hansel and Gretel has no redeeming social message either, except perhaps to beware of candy.
Funny how this series is happening in real life. I mean I felt for Serena. ^^ It's not easy to be popular and though I'm enjoying the attention, at times I wish I was not the noticeable type. ^^ Well... it's inevitable.... No effort at all... Taurus by nature.. :P
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