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R.I.P., Gossip Girl...
Warner / 430 Minutes / 2012 / Unrated / Street Date: February 12, 2013
The O.C. had something about it. I remember my dear friend Cash and I – both of us fairly strident TV viewers – were somewhat embarrassed to love that rich-kids-get-in-trouble series with all its fancy cars and vapid personalities, but we stayed with it for a while: There was something about the show’s particular inanity that kept us transfixed. Sure, we ended up abandoning the series eventually (boy, that was a stinker of a third season), but in the show’s glory days, we were willing and excited to hover around the TV set for an hour a week.
O.C. creator Josh Schwartz's Gossip Girl, though, never drummed up the same kind of tractor-beam pull. Gossip Girl sparkles and scintillates with the sheen of an expensive, hip series – the show continues to manifest magnificent production values here on its last season – but all told, there is really nothing at the center of this series.
Like a Desperate Housewives for the teeny-bopper crowd, Gossip Girl is a pastiche of lame clichés and painfully unbelievable romances that not only don’t ring true, it all just seems… dumb. And it’s not a good kind of dumb, which is a drag. If Gossip Girl were the hour-long equivalent of Laguna Beach, where privileged young idiots in thousand-dollar gowns get hammered in shi-shi clubs and then make out with various nincompoops, I’d be ready to go (I love a dumbass show), but Gossip Girl is simply bad news from beginning to end. And now, thankfully, we've reached the end of it.