Gossip Girl review in Chicago Sun Times

// November 4th, 2007

Psssst! Have you heard?
‘Gossip Girl’ is so bad, so smarmy, so deliciously wicked that it’s actually good — and it has the devoted viewers to prove it November 4, 2007

Nate observed the party. Debauchery was to begin shortly. But Nate unexpectedly questioned his idle life of wealth. His pinky young face flushed under an anime hairdo.

“The money, the drugs, the privileges,” Nate told his best friend Chuck. “They’re just keeping us numb, so we don’t know it’s better out there in the real world.”

Chuck sneered, appearing fey/preppy/same thing with his upturned collars and old-money affectation. (He rides a limo to prep school).

“Everyone out there wants to be us,” Chuck clucked back at Nate. “We are to be aspired to, and not run away from.”

Unconvinced by Chuck’s logic, Nate strayed, then returned like a good trust-fund baby after he tasted the real world for an hour or two. The real world is bitter and poor.

Nate (Chace Crawford) and Chuck (Ed Westwick) make up the male half of “Gossip Girl,” the best-watched TV show among teens. It was last week’s No. 1 and No. 10 downloads on iTunes. It’s a big online video draw. Culturally, it could be the new “O.C.,” maybe even the new “Melrose Place.”

Funny. When it debuted a month ago, “Gossip Girl” seemed cardboard, smarmy, yet so bad it was almost good. Soon, it became not just popular but a rarer thing: actually entertaining while simultaneously ridiculous.

For one thing, “Gossip” teens talk much smarter than the girls of “The Hills” do. Dan, the requisitely ethical “poor” boy (the son of a former rock star), judged one mean girl as being a “95-pound, doe-eyed, bon-mot-tossing, label-whoring package of girly evil. … I’d barely be exaggerating if I told you Medusa wants her withering glare back.”

Read the rest of the article here.

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