Gossip Girl went from being in on the joke to being the punchline

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http://www.avclub.com/article/gossip...nchline-229449

When The O.C. ended in 2007, the show’s creator, Josh Schwartz, followed it up with two very promising but very different series. One was the NBC spy dramedy Chuck (co-created with Chris Fedak), which took Schwartz out of the teen-soap game, but allowed him to keep one foot planted in Orange County: Chuck’s premise was essentially “What if an adult Seth Cohen became a spy?” The other show, The CW’s Gossip Girl (co-created with Stephanie Savage and based on the series of young-adult novels by Cecily Von Ziegesar), was another tale about privileged high schoolers—only set on the East Coast this time. Neither show was a hit in the ratings, but Gossip Girl wound up running for 121 episodes, concluding long after its pop-cultural significance had waned. While Chuck fought for a third-season renewal in 2009, Schwartz told The New York Times, “Chuck probably gets double the ratings of Gossip Girl. Gossip Girl has obviously hit this cultural nerve in [a] really specific way.”

Earlier in the show’s run, Schwartz said he took on Gossip Girl because he “liked the idea of doing a show like this at The CW, at a time where there weren’t a lot of these kind of shows out there. It reminded me of the glory days of The WB when I was in college… Those early years of Dawson’s Creek, Felicity, Buffy, that whole period of stuff.” But those shows—all of which aired on the networks that merged to form The CW—were much more earnest than Gossip Girl. The O.C. had a fish-out-of-water character—Chino expat Ryan Atwood (Ben McKenzie)—to contrast the show’s affluent California youths; Gossip Girl’s Brooklyn-based aspiring writer Dan Humphrey (Penn Badgley) wasn’t really from the wrong side of the tracks. But Schwartz had an answer to that as well:

Those universal emotions made a pop-culture phenomenon out of a teen show about spoiled high-schoolers whose every move was tracked by an omniscient gossip blogger. With its cast members booking magazine covers and the series earning accolades from the press, Gossip Girl brought a critically acclaimed new series to a fledgling broadcast outfit that lacked a serious sense of identity. It created a brand for The CW, at a time when the network was still little more than the combined ruins of The WB and UPN (and before it was TV’s go-to home for genre fare). It was cheekily dubbed “the Greatest Show of Our Time” and “the Greatest Teen Drama of All Time” by New York magazine. After slamming the series’ pilot on this website, former A.V. Club film editor Scott Tobias recanted, praising the show as “a weekly celebration/parody of conspicuous consumption and spectacularly cruel adolescent back-biting.” In his review of season one’s “Victor/Victrola,” he wrote: “It’s currently the most socially irresponsible hour of network television this side of maybe Deal Or No Deal.”

Despite Schwartz’s belief that Gossip Girl was a love letter to the teen dramas of the past, the show actually stuck out because it wasn’t like most teen dramas. It was dangerous and sexy and scandalous—and it was aware of these characteristics. Gossip Girl put on an air of maturity unseen in its genre since the reign of Beverly Hills, 90210’s Dylan McKay. Even in the pilot, the kids didn’t need fake IDs to drink alcohol at the bars of their family’s hotels. And they weren’t having secret parties with red Solo cups, either—they openly imbibed in front of their parents, and that was that. This is where The CW standard of staging a weekly event was born, with episodes dedicated to annual brunches, white parties, fashion shows, or even parties thrown on a whim to impress others. It’s a pattern that even genre shows like The Vampire Diaries have maintained.

Even on a ratings anemic network like The CW, making it to 100 episodes is no easy task, let alone 121 episodes. But Gossip Girl did it—it just grew further and further away from its original vision in doing so. Sonia Saraiya’s series finale review for The A.V. Club noted that despite it being “an episode that had two weddings, a death, and the long-awaited unveiling of the gossip girl herself,” the episode was “excruciatingly boring.” In trading in an earnest story for a scandalous one, the show ultimately became neither, as the show’s need for everything to be shocking made it so that it was no longer shocking. That “non-judging Breakfast Club” mentality remained, however, only in the most warped possible way: In that finale, Serena referred to Dan’s years torturing and stalking his friends, acquaintances, and family as Gossip Girl as his “love letter” to all of them. A show that was at one time self-aware in how awful its characters could be ultimately became complacent in that, and in that way, it was a fitting ending to what Gossip Girl had become. The show that Josh Schwartz had made—that show that reminded him of “the glory days of The WB”—had gone the way of The WB long before the finale.