By the time a television show reaches its fourth season, the characteristics of its main ensemble ought to be deeply entrenched and immediately recognizable to regular viewers. But on the occasion of Gossip Girl’s fourth season première, the ongoing teen soap—and its characters—are allowed some reinvention. The CW’s flagship franchise is in a precarious position: it’s a show that’s both out of time and losing its sizzle. Despite continuing global economic woes (at some point during “Belles du Jour,” the news broke the U.S. dollar had dropped to a new low in the Japanese market), the show’s stars are still wrapped in haute couture and placed in booths at trendy, expensive restaurants. The rise of microblogging and its role in celebrity culture makes it entirely doubtful that anyone in the Gossip Girl world would still religiously follow the titular blog. (Though Blair was the only one seen checking Gossip Girl updates tonight, and the tip she sent could have been sent out to everyone who follows @TheRealBlairWaldorf as well.) Then there’s the matter of the show’s stars: Penn Badgley can’t open a movie. Leighton Meester’s music career is a non-starter, and Taylor Momsen’s band The Pretty Reckless is limp facsimile of Gossip Girl soundtrack staple The Dead Weather. Chace Crawford got booted from the Footloose remake, and was then busted for marijuana possession in a suburb or Dallas. Blake Lively might have a brighter future as a fashion icon/cohort of human nightmares like Anna Wintour and Karl Lagerfeld.
So it’s perfectly understandable that the creative brass behind Gossip Girl might want to shake things up a bit—by, say, setting a good deal of this week’s action off the island of Manhattan. “Belles du Jour” quickly fills in the details of Blair and Serena’s summer in Paris: Serena fucked everything in the city with facial hair and/or a Vespa, while Blair spent her days staring longingly at Édouard Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l'herbe, hoping that a literal European prince would see beyond her too-obvious taste in French impressionists and give her the Grace Kelly treatment. The Paris scenes were a big selling point in promos for the première, and while the action there wasn’t much of a departure for Gossip Girl—but more on that in a second—the locales definitely livened up a visual palette that grew stale over the course of the third season. Meanwhile, both of the guys Serena left behind adjusted to new roles in New York: Nate tried to be the new Chuck with the contacts the old Chuck left in his little black book, while Dan hid in Brooklyn with Georgina and the baby they supposedly conceived together.
Were this a second- or third-season première, the sequence of Georgina’s Russian phone conversation would be an indication that the kid—a bundle of be-hatted joy named Milo, who has the power to calm even an irate Lily—is but an early step in a long con perpetrated by Georgina. But Michelle Trachtenberg’s conniving sociopath appears to have grown a conscience over the summer, and may have pulled the Humphreys into Milo’s orbit just to give him a loving home. Instead of Georgina, it’s Nate’s new squeeze Juliet (CW regular Katie Cassidy) with the most intriguing hand to reveal in coming episodes. Introduced as the cultured, compassionate antidote to the bimbos performing a commercial for Rock Band 3 (“It has a keyboard”) in Nate’s hotel suite, the character leaves “Belles du Jour” by flashing a cork-board diagram of the main cast’s social circle that would leave The Wire’s Lester Freamon thoughtfully nodding his head. There’s a fleeting implication that Juliet could be Gossip Girl, but seeing as Chuck survived that shooting in Prague and is living on the Continent under the assumed identity of “Henry,” we know that’s not true.