In over 60 episodes, Gossip Girl has gone through enough storylines and character arcs to last significantly more than the three seasons it’s been on the air. Gossip Girl isn’t merely a season by season battle for viewership; it’s a campaign that motors through stories and plot devices like Michael Bay goes through money on a special effects budget. It’s the show’s calling card and hasn’t changed as the cast gets older and moves from high school to college.
When we last saw the show’s two main focal points, Blair Waldorf (Leighton Meester) and Serena van der Woodsen (Blake Lively), they were high school graduates about to embark upon the college experience. Serena was headed off to Brown and Blair to NYU with the rest of the principal cast still in New York with her. After some cold feet from Serena keeps her in NYC and looking for some direction in her life, ostensibly because she’s a main character and needs to remain in the city to be relevant to all the drama, the show takes an interesting turn because of one thing: college.
Whereas the first two seasons dealt with the cast as high school students, as however implausible it is for twenty-somethings to be in high school, they are now in college and as such the dynamic of the show changes radically with the introduction of higher education. It allows for a much different character arc than before and there are some interesting things going on as we get to see them partially grow up. And a key to it is the change in the structure.
The social dynamic has changed between Blair and Serena; they are no longer high school friends and are instead rivals dependent on the aura of secondary education to validate their status. They are now in that area between teenagers and full-fledged adulthood, trying to figure out who they are without the dramatic overtones high school provides during the formative years. It provides for a lot of different ways of character development because while most of the cast has left college there are several characters still there; it allows for something interesting as everyone seemingly has one foot out of that dramatic environment and yet everyone still has one foot in it.
It makes for an interesting show, to say the least, as the dynamic has changed but the show’s substance hasn’t. This is still a highly melodramatic series with enough changing on a weekly basis that one nearly needs a flowchart to keep track of it all. With 22 episodes it takes the equivalent of a season of content every five episodes or so; it provides for an interesting season arc of stories that keeps the show constantly changing. The friendships and love lives of everyone involved throughout the show are never static and can sometimes be confusing yet somehow it manages to work on a consistent basis.
Gossip Girl remains, then, a show that somehow shouldn’t work on any level but a pure visual one and yet manages to be surprisingly entertaining and engrossing.
Presented in a Dolby Digital surround with a widescreen format, the show has a terrific transfer. This is a show with a lot of great scenery and colors, with an impressive selection of music and scoring, and it comes through clean and crisp.
LOL is a series of outtakes.
A Gossip Girl Fabulous Affair focuses on the show’s big set pieces, the gala events and party sequences, which the cast and crew equate to other shows using big action sequences and car chases. It’s interesting to see how everything comes together and how much care is taken into making everything fit into the show’s themes and tones.
Music Videos for “Bitch” by the Plasticines and “Bad Romance” by Lady Gaga are included.
One part guilty pleasure and another part cheeky melodrama, Gossip Girl somehow manages to remain one of the best things on television by taking a time honored formula from soap operas and applying it with some pizazz in prime time.
Warner Home Video presents Gossip Girl (The Complete Third Season). Starring Blake Lively, Penn Badgely, Chace Crawford, Kelly Rutherford, Kristen Bell. Running time 935 minutes. Not Rated. Released on DVD: August 24, 2010.
