gossip girl

Really, really fast in the case of the privileged teenagers portrayed in the CW's delicious new drama series "Gossip Girl."

Blake Lively plays Serena van der Woodsen, queen bee at a Manhattan private school. (By Kc Bailey -- The Cw)
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These underage private-school elitists living on Manhattan's Upper East Side dress in designer threads, are fond of martinis and champagne, can seemingly drink at any bar in New York (no fears of losing liquor licenses here, apparently) and trade witty bons mots as if they're members of the Algonquin Round Table.

And don't even get us started on their randy sex lives.

"Gossip Girl," from the teen-addled brain of Josh Schwartz, who served up the canceled "O.C.," carries on the legacy of that West Coast soap opera and perhaps turns it up a notch with both drama and sheer teen-soapy goodness. (It's all quite a startling contrast to those hard-working youngsters slaving away on "Kid Nation," which also debuts tonight on CBS.)

"Gossip Girl" is based on a popular series of young-adult novels by Cecily von Ziegesar about a mysterious blogger who keeps all the city's rich kids up on what's going on in a very vibrant social circuit. On the show, the blogger is never seen but only heard in a voice-over by Kristen Bell (she of the recently canceled "Veronica Mars").

Gossip Girl's topic du jour, at least in the pilot episode, involves the two top dogs in the high school hierarchy: gorgeous Serena van der Woodsen (Blake Lively, a clone of a young Ellen Barkin, right down to that smirk) and her beautiful BFF Blair Waldorf (Leighton Meester). Serena has just returned to New York after leaving abruptly a year earlier for a Connecticut boarding school, and the whole community is wondering: Why did she go in the first place and what's she doing back?

Blair, who felt dissed by Serena's abrupt departure, is cool to her returning "friend," and things are only going to get uglier when the reason for her leaving becomes apparent. "There's nothing Gossip Girl likes more than a good catfight." (Us, too, GG. Us, too.) "And this one has the makings of a classic," the blogger says in one of her many voice-overs.

Meanwhile, Chuck, one of the social scene's biggest players (superbly slimy Ed Westwick), knows why Serena fled town, and he'll surely exploit this information for his own good.

The show's other standout character is Dan (Penn Badgley), a middle-class outsider and overall nice guy who stumbles into the clique accidentally. Lucky Dan might soon be romantically linked to Serena, who, like, is so out of his league on many levels.

At times, it's overboard and maybe a bit giggle-inducing, like watching little kids play dress-up. But overboard is exactly where "Gossip Girl" wants to be -- and what viewers must embrace when taking the guilty plunge.
I'll admit it: I watched Wednesday night's series premiere of Gossip Girl, the new teen drama on the CW network that details the slightly-too-scandalous lives of privileged young New Yorkers--as chronicled by an anonymous blogger. One of the prominent characters in the first scene is a sleek LG Chocolate mobile phone. The show is packed with MacBooks, BlackBerrys, Sidekicks, and just about any other gadget that the average American high schooler could possibly want.

It is, indeed, tech-savvy. But let's face it--they aren't exactly dealing with the Gizmodo-guzzling demographic. I was betting that the word "blog" wouldn't even appear in the series premiere, despite the overall premise of the show.

Thankfully, I didn't bet any cash on it. "Blog" was said twice--albeit in the same conversation between socially awkward introvert Dan (played by Penn Badgley) and his father Rufus (played by Matthew Settle), a suspiciously good-looking ex-rock star. The two were stapling posters for Rufus' band's concert on lampposts around the Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg, which is apparently Gossip Girl's equivalent of "the 'hood." (If you'd like a reality check, head over to Craiglist and do a search for Williamsburg apartments. Yeah, not cheap.)

The approximately 16-year-old Dan seemed to think it was all kind of tedious. "You know, Dad, there's this thing called MySpace where you post all this information online," he said. "Save some trees. Have a blog." See? He said blog.

His father scoffed: "If musicians got off their blogs and picked up their guitars, the music business would be in better shape." Hmm, so according to that logic we can blame blogging indie rockers for that "This Is Why I'm Hot" song? I'll take it.

Dan's response was predictable: "Spoken like a true relic." Funny, since the actor playing his dad doesn't look a day over 35.

So maybe I lost my personal Gossip Girl bet, but I'm still holding out for the episode in which the anonymous hellraiser of a narrator is revealed to be a Boston-based Forbes magazine editor