Channel Surfing: Gossip Girl

A show by the people behind The O.C. about privileged private schoolers in Manhattan - let's see how Gossip Girl can differentiate itself from that "amazingly fresh to head slappingly formulaic crap" Fox gem, shall we? The pilot starts with Peter Bjorn and John's "Young Folks" so it's got the hot-indie-rock-hits-from-last-year thing going for it. One of the main characters has Peter Gallagher caliber eyebrows. There's the outsider/invisible guy who has a crush on the popular girl and whose dad isn't part of the hoity toity society they live in, and his freshman sister who's trying hard to become part of the cool crowd (that,uh, works out well for her). However, it's narrated like Sex in the City as written on a Gawker-like gossip blog, and all the characters seem to hang on the blog's every word from their identical Sidekicks (apparently Apple didn't pony up the dough for a set of matching iPhones).

On The O.C. the main characters sometimes still behaved like your average high schooler - the usual "big deal" episodes were made over drugs and sex. Here we have one of the girls decide that it's time to cash in her v-card just to make sure her boyfriend doesn't go for her returning best friend/enemy (please die if you ever use the term 'frenemy'). Ditto for casual drinking (in bars that apparently don't card anyone) and drug use and equally casual attempted rape (twice in the episode by the same character!). All the mothers we meet in the pilot seem to be cloned from Season 1 Julie Cooper bitchy/evil/self-absorbed molds and have the same "I know secrets about you so watch out" conversations that their kids are having. Also we have a father who tells his son to keep dating the girl he broke up with because the father is trying to get a big contract from her mother and they need it to keep their family from going bankrupt. Like Jimmy Cooper if he was evil!

Bottom line, after reading the above it doesn't sound like this show is all that great. The title is also incredibly ... well, embarrassingly girly. However, the ladies on this show are ridiculously hot. I mean, not even funny hot. Just plain hot. And they're drinking and doing drugs and having sex and being catty toward each other. So I'm going to have to play this one by eye.