In the last moments Gossip GirlIn the 2007 pilot episode of Screamin’ , the otherworldly plinks and spatial guitar riffs that open Angels & Airwaves’s 2006 song “The Gift” echo as Blake Lively’s It Girl, Serena van der Woodsen, leaves a party hand in hand with Penn Badgley’s Lonely Boy, Dan Humphrey. Watching it again in 2024, at 34, the song reaches into my chest and grabs my beating heart, urging it to pick up the pace and remember what it feels like to kiss a boy while the song hums loudly on a car radio.
I'm 16 again, and life stretches out before me, full of passion and promise. Maybe one day I'll be an It Girl living in New York City, bucking relationship trends to fall for a thoughtful, artistic young man with an impressive amount of chest hair. Maybe I'll take inspiration from an expensive designer gown and sew my own dress so I can wear something fabulous to a fancy Upper East Side party. Maybe I'll go to college, get a degree, graduate debt-free, and find a job that will earn me enough money to buy my own house. It's all possible, right? Wrong.
Watch again Gossip Girl In 2024
Gossip GirlThe series, based on Cecily von Ziegesar’s young adult novels of the same name, aired on what was then known as The CW from 2007 to 2012 (though you can watch it in its entirety on the streaming service Max now). It weathered the 2008 financial crisis but remained firmly rooted in the grandiose excesses of Manhattan’s elite. Now, the housing market crash, the election of Barack Obama, and the subsequent conservative backlash serve as a window into the world as it did before the reign of the iPhone or the proliferation of social media. Watching it now is equal parts shocking and satisfying—so shamelessly, utterly vitriolic, and controversial that I’m surprised it stayed on the air this long.
The above mentioned sweet, hopeful Gossip Girl moment came just seconds after Bad Boy Chuck Bass' (Ed Westwick) attempted sexual assault. Allegations of sexual assault against him In 2017, Dan's little sister Jenny (Taylor Momsen) and Kristen Bell's sarcastic Gossip Girl narrator remind her that Serena will be aggressively bullied by Chuck and his former best friend Blair Waldorf (Leighton Meester) when school starts again on Monday. Gossip Girl such a pure snapshot of the zeros: the casual violence against women, the glorification of underage drinking and drug use, the brutal crushing of hopes and dreams, the material excesses, the almost non-stop needle dropping of your iTunes top 25, the clever, slyly sarcastic dialogue of disaffected youth. Nothing can stuff you into a time capsule, hastily punch “2007” into your console, and unceremoniously send you back almost 20 years Gossip Girl.
As an adult living on student loans and in a barely affordable Brooklyn apartment, it's a strange feeling to watch. Gossip Girl It’s what defined media during that era, what helped create today’s internet culture, where horrible insults can be thrown at you from anywhere. After all, this is the same era where emo music reigned supreme, where self-proclaimed sensitive boys demonized young women who didn’t like them, and the music that dominated my daily life. Girls growing up in the early 2000s internalized these ideologies—slut-shaming, body-shaming, status-shaming, style-shaming—and they still carry them with them today.
That's why 2021 Gossip Girl The reboot was doomed to fail (and it did, after just two seasons, but at least it took a page from the OG’s book and was largely shot on location in NYC). It couldn’t recreate the brutality of the original series without getting “canceled,” and it couldn’t offer a toned-down version of what made the ’00s series so popular without becoming toothless. Like a scientific phenomenon that can only be replicated under the most specific of circumstances, Gossip Girl could only exist from 2007 to 2012.
I'm 34, yes, but only for an hour Gossip Girl It takes me back to the body of my adolescence, bringing with it a wave of emotions and memories that wash over me like a tidal wave of sewage coming down from the East River. But at least when I watch it now, I know for sure that Chuck Bass is a total jerk and that you should never wear a straw hat with a cocktail dress. That's growing up.