She made adolescence rhyme with excess, luxury and lust, fueled rumors and did not please parents: we called “Gossip Girl”, the extravagant, the enjoyable, the disturbing.
If you were a teenager in 2007, you couldn’t have missed Gossip Girl, which was then the new series from Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage (Newport Beach).
Adapted from the novels by Cecily von Ziegesar, the teen drama follows the extravagant adventures of the golden youth of Manhattan, who become the favorite target of an omniscient blogger who dares to reveal the secrets of their scandalous lives. And it all begins when Dan, a young man of modest origins, arrives at a private high school on the Upper East Side…
Gossip Girl, it’s the teenage series that pushed the genre into excess. Indeed, if she is not the first to take an interest in the daily lives of rich adolescents, she went further than her predecessors and opened the way for daring teen dramas. Here, we are, just like Dan (played by Penn Badgley, the Joe from You, a character who also has some points in common with that of Dan…), projected into a world where we have no place – at the beginning anyway.
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Indeed, in GG (for those close to you), it is not so much a question of identifying with the characters – unless you are part of the New York elite and have a penchant for the worst shenanigans – but rather to envy them, to love them and to hate them at the same time, like the tumultuous relationship between the protagonists Blair, played by Leighton Meester, and Serena, who was almost played by Jennifer Lawrence instead. by Blake Lively!
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Between love and hatred, jealousy and betrayal, sabotage and competition: the American dream takes a big hit. All the classics soap opera adolescent are here exploited to the extreme and anything is allowed for this “first (of) the) class” youth who fight for academic prestige – although we do not see them studying much – while drowning in the debauchery.
Young adults around the world quickly let themselves be seduced by this “forbidden” world of glitter and baseness, with its risky dialogues, its breathtaking wardrobes and above all its viral gossip which so well represented the 2010s – namely the era of blogs and the beginnings of the dissemination of gossip via new technologies. Its success has also generated a reboot in 2021, which however did not meet with the same success.
Openly banking on our fascination with this deliciously diabolical world in which more than questionable characters evolve that we hate to adore (or the opposite), Gossip Girl hit big in its time and well deserves its status as the queen of addictive and cheeky teen drama.
Gossip Girlcreated by Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, with Leighton Meester, Blake Lively, Penn Badgley…
6 seasons to watch on Netflix.