TV Review: Gossip Girl -Summer Kind of Wonderful
Critique on Season 2 Episode 1, CW Network Program, Teenage Drama
Sep 2, 2008
Gossip Girl returns with season 2, and it starts off with a surprise, as we find Nate (played by Chance Crawford) canoodling with his much older, much married, new girlfriend, and Dan (Penn Badgley) kissing and flirting with random girls. This sets up the tone for the new season indicating to us that there’s been a swap of lovers between seasons that is bound to give way to a whole new batch of storylines.
Gossip Girl: The Story So Far
As the episode opens, we see that Blair (Leighton Meester) has a new boyfriend, much to the dismay of Chuck (played by Ed Westwick), whom if we remember stood her up last season and abandoned her at the airport as the couple was meant to leave for Europe.
Jenny (Taylor Momsen) meanwhile is working for a designer, and being treated rather poorly, as expected in this show that runs with the stereotypes like a baton in a race! Typical of the over-use of stereotypes, Blair’s new boyfriend James (Patrick Heusinger) is the epitome of the pretend- Hampton “Richie” who has a secret.
Blair is back to her scheming ways, as she tries to persuade Serena to get down to some dirty, and tries her level best to make Chuck jealous, by rubbing her new boyfriend in his face. Blair’s place in this teen-world drama is secure, because every teen drama needs a bad girl, and Blair is orchestrated and manufactured to be one in the highest degree, albeit one that is overly dramatic and rife with contrived characteristics, but a bad girl nonetheless.
Too Slow of a Start for a Season Premier of Gossip Girl
Gossip Girl has been teenage fare from the start, and its plots and storylines have always been dripping with stereotypes and clichés, as well as over the top dramatic moments mandatory to keep the teens watching. However, the series usually moves at a pretty fast pace, that keeps the thrill on high, but this opening episode to season 2 was rather bland in comparison. The episode moves slowly and labouredly, losing a lot of the heat and excitement it held previously.
The only unexpected lightning speed development occurs in the Nate-Dan quarter. Serena kisses Nate in an attempt to make his older, married, girlfriend jealous, and in the process Dan catches them in this tangle. Dan then freaks out at Serena, but before Serena can react, Dan’s random kissing partners show up and reveal about Dan’s little summer fling activities. Of course why and how Dan’s kissing partners happen to be at the same event as him seems too ridiculous to even fathom an answer, but at least we don’t have to go through the next umpteen episodes wondering and being teased about Serena finding out the truth about Dan, which is usually the case with drama series!
The "Guilty Pleasure" still lives on in Gossip Girl, in this episode Summer Kind of Wonderful.
And that is precisely why Gossip Girl is fascinating, - because it reaches its peak at lightning speed, and takes on new peaks after, and the series doesn’t mercilessly tease the audience into waiting for disputes, clarifications, and manipulations to be explained and cleared. All misdeeds are clarified and dealt with within one episode usually, and that has to be a precedent not only in teen drama, but in drama overall, and that is one aspect where Gossip Girl shines.
