DVDFile

Warner Home Video / 2007-2008 / 1024 Minutes / Unrated
Street Date: August 19, 2008

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.

Now The O.C. creator Josh Schwartz has a new show on the air: Gossip Girl. I really hadn’t had much experience with the series before these DVDs arrived – I knew that squares in one state or another were violently angry about the show’s risqué photo campaigns, but that’s about it. All I knew was that I hoped for a similar experience to the one I had with The O.C.: I wanted to hate myself for loving it.

That isn’t the case. Gossip Girl sparkles and scintillates with the sheen of an expensive, hip series – the show has magnificent production values – but 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 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 an entertainingly dumb show), but Gossip Girl is simply bad news from frame one.

The pilot presents Serena Van Der Woodsen (Blake Lively) as a hip young thing who returns to New York after having mysteriously disappeared a few months before. In addition to the multi-layered hints and clues as to why Serena flew the coop, her readmission to the hipster scene she left behind houses clique-drama upon clique-drama. Her best friend Blair (Leighton Meester) doesn’t trust Serena (the two may have parted on not so fantastic terms), and Blair’s beau (the tabloid-ubiquitous Chace Crawford) fuels the fire by showing an early interest in Serena. From there, we watch the you-know-what hit the fan with these high-school-aged socialites as they careen from party to makeout spots and back again.

It’s simply too thin of a premise to maintain interest. Veronica Mars was similar in structure (if not in tone) to this show, and it did a much better job of adhering to the ins and outs of its narrative world. Gossip Girl, on the other hand, comes off as being overly saccharine and unbelievable. Again, you can have a brain-dead show – that’s not the problem – but you absolutely have to establish a world that is at the very least consistent in its presentation.

I don’t know what Cash thinks of Gossip Girl, but this writer found himself rolling his eyes even before the pilot was over. This is bland-o television at its most obvious, a show that has the kind of young flesh, bitchy one-liners and double-crossings that are the trademarks of excellent soap opera programming, but it’s got no meat. It’s all glitz and no sass.

The Video: How Does The Disc Look?

I’ll tell you this much, though: Gossip Girl sure looks great on DVD. These 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen transfers sometimes showcase some light grain in darker sequences, but that kind of nitpicking is what it will take to find even moderate flaws in this collection of presentations. Finely grained detail is sharp and strong, black levels are consistent and deep, and color accuracy is spot-on (flesh tones juxtapose wonderfully with the bright tones of the show’s glitzy surroundings). Really nice.

The Audio: How Does The Disc Sound?

Fidelity is maintained well on these Dolby Digital 5.1 tracks, even if the overall sound design of the series is fairly plain. Dialogue sounds fantastic – it’s been recorded and placed in the mix with excellent attention to detail – but surrounds are surprisingly underutilized. During some louder outdoor moments, we’ll get some nice atmospherics and music cues from the sides and the back, but for the most part, these are capably constructed mixes that stay pretty much front and center.

A Portuguese Dolby Surround 2.0 track is also included, as are English SDH, French, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, and Thai subtitles.

Supplements: What Goodies Are There?

Gossip Girl’s bonus slate falls pretty flat; supplements are definitely the underachievers of this DVD box set. None of the deleted scenes add much to the overall story arcs, and the pair of music videos are hard to get through at all. More interesting are the trio of featurettes. The Beginning, XOXO: Concept to Execution (30:00) looks at the show’s development and production. Gossip Girl Couture (15:00) focuses on the show’s super-fancy wardrobe. And, A Gossip Girl Wedding (6:00) is a beyond-bland description of a setpiece from one of the show’s more elaborate episodes. Rounding out the collection is a run-of-the-mill gag reel.

Exclusive DVD-ROM Features: What happens when you pop the disc into your PC?

There are no DVD-ROM features on this DVD.

Final Thoughts

I may have severely disliked this Gossip Girl: The Complete First Season box set, but I’ll be damned if it doesn’t look and sound wonderful. Fans will truly dig the show’s top-of-the-line presentation (there are even a few bonuses that will keep devotees of the series intrigued for a while). But those not fully versed in the Gossip Girl universe might want to rent before they buy; this one is definitely not for all tastes.