Gossip Girl: The Complete Second Season

Review By: J.P. Mangalindan
JPMangalindan@TheCinemaSource.com

Season Grade: B
DVD Features Grade: B+
Overall Grade: B

For two years now, non-Gossip Girl aficionados have wondered what all the fuss is about: why are tweens, teens, and twenty-something’s obsessed with a show about bratty, ignorant Upper East Siders who consider Brooklyn as foreign as Columbia and the New York subway system a germ-ridden last resort? As someone addicted to this show from day one, even I can attest that many of the criticisms lobbed at it are valid. Often, the plot is ridiculous, the characters obnoxious and narcissistic, and the dialogue mind-bogglingly ditzy (“I like ESPN and you like… books and movies.”).

That said, what the show does offer is a seductive, if not always accurate look at the lifestyle of New York’s most privileged. Half the reason we watch is to see what ostentatious shenanigans, Serena, Blair and company encounter next; and also deep down, we wish we could have that life. (As a red-blooded American who currently works at a fashion magazine, I’m naturally materialistic. Sue me.) So with regards to dangling this urban lifestyle of the rich and famous in front of us and whetting our appetite for more of it, Gossip Girl succeeds really well.

Where Season One did a bang-up job of setting the scene, Season 2’s mission seemed to be simpler: deliver more drama. Entering their senior year, the kids have to deal with getting into the college of their choice, which for some random reason, ends up being Yale over Harvard and Princeton. (It’s never really explained why, just that Blair’s entire purpose in life is so that she could attend the third-best Ivy League in America.) So, there’s that to contend with, Nate’s family being bankrupt thanks to the shady financial dealings of his fugitive father, Serena falling for a con artist who steals her mother and all her socialite friends’ money, the repeated breaking up and getting back together of Dan and Serena as well as Blair with Chuck and Nate, the brief return of arch-enemy Georgina and swindling socialite Poppy Lipton, and the meteoric rise and fall of Jenny, or “Little J,” who becomes a star at her fashion internship with Blair’s mom, loses that internship, quits school, and tries to start her own fashion line. And somewhere in all that confusing story-telling muck, Dan gets it on with Serena and Blair’s teacher, Ms. Carr, a cherubic, naïve young gal from the Midwest who gets chewed up and spat out by Blair’s deviousness in the end. (The moral of that story arc is that you never mess with Blair unless you have a social death wish.)

The two most notable episodes of the season aired later on. In episode 18, “The Age of Dissonance,” the seniors are obligated to act in a play, an ambitious take on Edith Wharton’s "The Age of Innocence.” Serena, who has a thing for the director, Julian, gets Vanessa, a theater buff, to ...