Highlights from NYMag’s Gossip Girl recaps - Season 1 - Episodes 1-7

As NYmag.com says “The glory of Gossip Girl is in its implausibility”. They do a recap each week. Here are my highlights from episodes 1-7, in no particular order:

• Rihanna is constantly playing, in every situation.
• Blair: “My father left my mother for a 31-year-old model. A male model.” Plus 10 for awesomeness.
• “Brown doesn’t offer degrees in Slut.” Wait — you can make your own major at Brown. So, Blair, Serena can major in Slut if she wants to. And she can do it Pass/Fail!
• Nate’s dad wants him to go to Dartmouth. He actually calls it the “old alma mater. But Nate, face flickering impressively from “blank” to “blank/tortured” — acting! — says he wants to go “out West.” Presumably so he can join the cast of some other show.
• Serena and Dan are flirting together again. Yay! Oh, and their little siblings are flirting with each other, too. Hm. And wait, their parents have already slept together? Uh-oh, we smell something gross.
• Blair (in a dream) looks in the window and sees Serena, being served tea by Nameless Asian Friend and Nameless Black Friend, each of whom is wearing French maid outfits. … we’re giving it a Plus 1 for the casually racist minorities-in-uniform thing.
• Suited men leer at Blair and Serena. Plus 5. It would be more if homeless men leered, too.
• Plus 2 for Chuck’s amazing line, “He looks like Matthew McConaughey between movies.”
• Near the end, when Serena is setting up a date with a skeptical Dan Humphrey, she says, “I’m hanging up before thou dost protest again!” Plus 3, because really, what teenage girl in the city doesn’t think at some point that she’s Julia Stiles?
• Did anyone notice that during truth or dare, the unnamed Asian and black sidekicks made out? That was as inevitable as Blair’s eventual dramatic second-season “hair change” will be — it just felt right.
• Mrs. van der Woodsen carries an Hermès Birkin bag to Brooklyn with her. Quite frankly, it would be embarrassingly fake if she didn’t.
• Now that we’ve gotten a good look at Erik’s room at the mental institution, we get why he hates it so much. The place is a Pottery Barn nightmare — all lavender walls and chocolate-brown accents and a woody sleigh bed.
• Blair’s sleepover is “the most important event of the season.” Wait, wasn’t the big brunch the most important event of the season? Also, the Ivy mixer?
• Is Vanessa supposed to be black or white? We just don’t know!
• on this show, BLACK GIRLS DON’T SPEAK.
• When Nate’s mom (that’s his mom, right? Not a trophy wife? Everyone on this show looks like they are aged five years apart – including some classmates) finds the coke, as usual, Nate’s eyes dart stupidly from side to side. He has no idea what show (or drug, for that matter) he’s even supposed to be on.
• Jenny gets revenge on Chuck for trying to date-rape her by locking him on the roof in his underwear. Minus 10 because even though chicks always do this in movies, no one ever does this in real life. What is this, Ally McBeal?
• Serena’s mom tells Serena, “You know at your age, you should be playing the field.” Okay, we know Mrs. van der Woodsen is wacked, but urging her daughter to be a ho? Doesn’t she know Serena went through that phase when she was 15? Being 16 is all about long-term relationships!
• We were going to say the football sheets on Dan’s bed are unrealistic — Dan is 18, he’s a cool Brooklyn aesthete, maybe he would have moved on to, like, K-Mart Nautica Collection navy blue? But then we remembered that a few years ago we slept with a guy who had A-Team sheets. And a twin bed. And he was 25.
• This is New York, not Everybody Loves Raymond; you can’t just go wherever you want and expect people to be there to receive you. They’re not going to be at home, they’re at Starbucks, duh.

TV Ratings

The premiere of the new 90210 was watched by about 5 million viewers. This is considered a success for the CW network. By comparison, the final season of the original 90210 “averaged nearly 8.4 million viewers per week”.

Barack Obama’s nomination acceptance speech was watched by 38.4 million viewers. He was beaten by John McCain, with 38.9 million. Sarah Palin drew 37.2 million and Joe Biden about 24 million.

A typical episode of “Deal Or No Deal” gets around 11 million viewers, an American Idol finale around 28 million and LOST around 13 million.

About 13 million NFL fans watched the season opener, the lowest number since 2002 (although this still supposedly helped McCain since the game finished just before he spoke). The Beijing Olympics averaged around 25 - 30 million. Amazingly, in China the Olympic opening ceremony was watched by about 840 million making it probably the biggest television event ever.

[Other than the last figure, these are all US numbers. I’m too scared to see what things are popular in Australia.]

The Ting Tings at the Ding Dong

In a cosmic alignment of cool names, The Ting Tings played at the Ding Dong Lounge in Melbourne last night.

In a cosmic alignment of rude names, “ting tings” evidently means “cute, small penis” in Japanese slang (says Wikipedia). This makes “Ting Tings at the Ding Dong” even cooler.

902102 doesn’t suck as much as expected

I take back what I said about Michael Lee and Lucille Bluth. They can both obviously act and 90210 was not able to suppress them. Also, the producers deserve credit for simply using the Lucille Bluth character directly (although is there a cross-over between Arrested Development and 90210 viewers?).

I’m not sure what message they are trying to send with the addition of a single black character into the elite white world. Don’t worry!! He’s adopted!! Straight from the corners of Baltimore. Look - he plays lacrosse not basketball!

The white adoptive parents also make some comment, while lying in bed inside their mansion, about being really glad their adopted black kid’s birth parents are not around. I guess because property values would drop or something.

But, the show isn’t good enough to be great, and not bad enough to be good. Gossip Girl totally wins.

Question: why didn’t they call it 902102?