They're Paristocrats. And, Lord help me, I loved spending an hour hating them, their pedigrees, and their unlimited credit cards. It was like studying the peculiar mating rituals and shopping habits of the species Manhattanus Elitus.
The series, based on the "Gossip Girl" novels by Cecily von Ziegesar, is set amid extremely wealthy prep schoolers on New York's Upper East Side. With such last names as Waldorf and van der Woodsen, they appear old enough to sip martinis at hotel bars without attracting attention. Indeed, they could easily pass as their young parents' friends. They inhabit the same rarified New York so vividly portrayed in the movies "Metropolitan" and "Igby Goes Down," but they aren't intellectual and cultured so much as wily. Their sophistication is all on the surface, below which they hook up and blow off and make up just like every high-schooler in America.
Serena, played with willowy wariness by Blake Lively, is the premiere's returning heroine, back from boarding school to tend to her younger brother, who attempted suicide. Serena's best frenemy, Blair (Leighton Meester), knows her boyfriend has a thing for Serena, and so she shamelessly snubs her. From whom did Blair learn to dis so ruthlessly? None other than her arch mother, Eleanor (Florencia Lozano), who spits lines at her such as, "Put some product in your hair, your ends are dry." Oh, ouch Mummy.
Into this wasp's nest comes the less-wealthy Humphreys - Dan (Penn Badgley), younger sister Jenny (Taylor Momsen), and dad Rufus (Matthew Settle), a rock singer who just rated number 9 on Rolling Stone's list of best forgotten bands of the 1990s. The Humphreys live in a massive loft, but comparatively speaking, they're from the wrong side of the tracks. Dan and Jenny hunger to run with the old-moneyed kids, but at what price?
