In the last 20 years, a phenomenon known as “ reality TV” emerged. (Insert eye roll here.)
In the last two months, another phenomenon emerged that I call un-reality TV. I am speaking of course of “The Gossip Girl Reboot,” whose five-episode run thankfully ended last night.
We were intrigued simply because we’d never seen the original Gossip Girl series way back in the 2000s. Let this experience be a reminder the curiosity can indeed kill the cat.
What’s so unreal about the reboot? In a word, everything.
Let’s start with the casting. The young actors and actresses (whose names I will omit in hopes they may redeem themselves someday) are at least in their early to mid 20s, yet they portray high school students attending a posh UES prep school (whose exterior is the Museum of the City of New York on Fifth Avenue).
They party hard with each other, break off and start up new liaisons (both gay and straight, some with their teachers) and attend private clubs (like Dumbo Hall, an obvious nod to the Dumbo branch of Soho House) where they slug down cocktails with abandon (and without having to provide any proof of age. Yeah, right.)
The eponymous (and anonymous) Gossip Girl is actually a coterie of teachers at this private school (one played by Tavi Gevinson) who are revenging themselves on their intractable students by writing an online gossip column depicting the students in a variety of comprising situations. Students and parents alike are aghast at the column yet read it anyway. (There are more text alert “pings” in this show than you get in your average hearing test.)
Maybe I’m missing something, not being the parent of a kid in private school on the UES, but no parent on the UES I know would put up with such shenanigan from their kids. My old
school Italian father would look at them, shake his head, and say, “I’d give them one smack.”
Speaking of those you’d like to smack, we eagerly the credits that roll at the end of each episode, to see the names of the writers. Someday there will be, I am sure, a Nuremberg trail of scribes who commit such crimes against the English language.
You may ask yourself what are terrific actors like John Benjamin Hickey, Luke Kirby, and Laura Benanti doing in crap like this? Answer: collecting big fat paychecks.
You may also ask yourself, constant reader, why we have been so glued to our iPads watching this show. As the gay character in Paul Rudnick’s “Jeffrey” said when asked why he would date Jacqueline Onassis, “to see the apartment.” It comes down to our morbid curiosity to see where in 212 these episodes were filmed.
Again, constant reader, be forewarned: curiosity killed the cat.