Gossip Girl: "Pilot"
(Premieres on The CW tonight, 9pm ET / 8pm CT)
OMG! Josh Schwartz has a new show! And it’s just like The O.C., except the duplicitous rich kids are from the Upper East Side instead of the California coast. Okay, so they’re not as colorful, and a little difficult to tell apart. And there’s no Seth Cohen to cut through the teen soap trash with adorable quips, no Sandy Cohen with his shaggy hippie-surfer idealism, and no trailer-trash Julie Cooper to seduce the nearest power broker and terrorize the local populace. All three of those beloved (or beloved until the show took a nosedive in Season Two) characters have surrogates in Gossip Girl, the first of two Schwartz projects (the other being NBC’s Chuck) to roll out this season. But none of the GG facsimiles measure up to their O.C. counterparts, at least not in the pilot episode, which plays a little like a discarded O.C. script with the names changed and CW’s demographic-clubbing factored in.
As if to twist the knife after Veronica Mars’ cancellation, the “Gossip Girl” of the title is voiced by Kristen Bell, whose witticisms from the earlier show are replaced here by annoying shorthand narration from a secret blog. Everybody in the show’s exclusive private school checks the “Who Is Gossip Girl?” site and circulates its poisonous buzz through the Sidekicks apparently holstered to their waists. The big news is that crazy-rich former bad girl Serena (Blake Lively) has suddenly resurfaced after she left for boarding school under mysterious circumstances a year earlier. Serena’s return causes tension with her former BFF, crazy-rich former good girl Blair (Leighton Meester), who doesn’t understand why she left without even dropping a line. When they meet to hash out their differences, the conversation goes cordially (“I love you, B.” “I love you too, S.”), but there’s trouble a-brewin’, centered on S’s relationship with B’s long-time BF Nate (Chace Crawford).
Meanwhile, super-bland Seth Cohen stand-in Dan (Penn Badgley), son of a super-bland Sandy Cohen type Rufus (Matthew Settle), comes from humbler economic roots than his peers, and he and his bubbly sister Jenny (Taylor Momsen) have enough trouble just trying to fit in. His problems deepen when the scandalized Serena, now persona non grata to the school’s inner circle, takes a romantic interest in him. And then there’s lone-wolf Chuck (Ed Westwick), a malicious would-be roofie-dropper who tries to cut through the pleasantries with Jenny at a party and get right to the date rape.