You Know You Loved Me...Reliving The Gossip Girl Finale
It’s the end of Gossip Girl as we know it, and you know what? Just like Michael Stipe, I feel fine. During the show's inaugural seasons, there's no denying it was a pop culture phenomenon, giving viewers a window through which they could glimpse how the other half lived, cavorted, and treated their maids (I'll miss you the most, Dorota). Blair’s headbands became a national fashion trend. The Parents Television Council got all up in arms over the show’s scandalous “OMFG” ads. Americans who hadn’t seen The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants were introduced to Blake Lively, she of the perfect golden hair and legs for days, who would become a favorite of Anna Wintour, Karl Lagerfeld, and Christian Louboutin, and go on to become Mrs. Ryan Reynolds.
With Gossip Girl, The CW truly created a new dramatic television subgenre. Every episode either revolved around or featured at least one climactic party/gala/fête/benefit/auction/fashion show/wedding/play that brought all of the characters’ story arcs together. As the show grew in popularity and the costumers had every major fashion label at their beck and call, it truly became the most ostentatious party procedural of our time.
(On a personal note, in 2008, when GG mania was at its peak, I covered an open call for extras who would appear at the Hamptons White Party in the season two premiere episode for New York Magazine (whose Tuesday morning Gossip Girl Reality Index posts were just as eagerly anticipated as new episodes on Monday nights), and it was there that I met my best friend Chris. We always joke that if we ever get married, our Times wedding announcement would say that we met at a Gossip Girl casting. Maybe Cecily von Ziegesar would attend.)
As time went on, however, things took a turn for the absurd. The characters sort of went to college, but the writers didn’t know how to successfully combine the Upper East Side gala-attending lifestyle with a typical university experience, so that kind of fell by the wayside in favor of ascending to the head of their parents’ empires (Blair, Chuck) or suddenly becoming successful business executives (Nate, of all people). They also all kept sleeping with one another. Surely, in all of Manhattan, there are more than two romantic interests available for a gorgeous blonde with a bodacious bod. We were also supposed to care about their parents’ lives, when really those story arcs just reminded us that Dan and Serena were technically step-siblings in an on-again-off-again relationship.
Finally, when all other plotlines seemed to have been exhausted, the characters started trying to figure out who Gossip Girl was. It all became very self-referential (and self-reverential). When Cecily von Ziegesar published the first Gossip Girl novel in 2002, the idea of a website devoted to covering the exploits of a specific group of people was entirely new — Perez Hilton did not launch his site until 2004; TMZ debuted in 2005. By the time the show began exploring Gossip Girl’s identity as a major plotline, viewers were inundated with gossip blogs, and the world had long ago stopped caring about who wrote them.
Photo: Courtesy of CW
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