Who Says 'Seal the Deal?'

If there's anything notable about how Gossip Girl's debut episode opens, it's that it's so aggressively un-notable. Our introduction to Serena ("the blonde female lead") is a shot of her attractively wistful face staring out a train window; our introduction to Dan ("the dark-haired male lead") is a scene in which he tells his father he's hungry. There's nothing about this that would make us want to keep watching. After Serena gets off the train, a voice-over tells us that Serena is getting off the train in a tone that implies but does not explain importance--as if we should know already--and the Humphreys' conversation suggests a pre-existing but essentially uninteresting tension with their mother. We're not built up but dropped in.

Why in the world would you make the opening of your brand new television series un-memorable? Well, the fancy term for starting a narrative in the middle of the action is in media res, and as anyone who's read the Aeneid (or seen Pulp Fiction) can tell you, it can be very effective, as long as the middle you're being dropped into is exciting. This is not the case with Serena and Dan in the goddamn train station. So why, then? Well, because it's TV, and because TV is serial. The opening of Gossip Girl is doing an interesting thing: it's taking an assumed familiarity with the genre of teen dramas, within which the show is explicitly situating itself, and making that into a continuous thread rather than one cut off at the barriers of individual shows--making the whole genre into a serial narrative. It's using the very familiarity of its setting to dispense with the normal necessities of set-up. It safely--and, really, correctly--assumes that if you are watching Gossip Girl, you have watched other shows like it, and so with a few spare gestures it's able to tell you what the conflicts that already exist. Whereas most narratives employing the technique of in media res drop you in the middle of action that has been going on within its own fictional world, out of sight of the viewer, Gossip Girl's opening drops you in the middle of a world you already know: the world of teen dramas. And as we'll see, it doesn’t merely drop you in the middle of conventions and stories you already know about, as most genre shows do, but quite literally inside the (comic-style) universe created by other shows.

The solid proof for this comes a little later in that first episode, with a seemingly innocuous shot of Dan getting on a bus. Now, the entire scene that follows takes place on that bus, so we can safely assume that the particular bus was chosen deliberately--they had to first acquire the bus, then shoot on it, and probably pay for it. The particular appearance of that bus is no accident--the producers chose it very deliberately. So it is highly notable what ad is plastered on its side. It's an ad for Smallville--a show that, like Gossip Girl, is on the CW network.

Normally, characters on a TV show seeing an ad for another TV show would simply indicate that the show takes place in the real world, and undoubtedly Gossip Girl does: it's set in a very recognizable present-day New York City. But context matters. The fact that it's on the CW, née the WB, is highly significant, and the fact that the ad in question is for the show Smallville is even more so. In the CW's universe of teen dramas, Smallville is an anomaly, because it does not take place in the real world but in the explicitly fictional world of the comic book from which it originates. The creators of that show could have made it more realistic by ditching the made-up town and city names, but Metropolis is still Metropolis, not New York. This is not in our world. In contrast, most of the CW's other shows take place very much in reality; even if the towns in which they're set don't actually exist, the characters will then take trips to places we're all familiar with. Some of the shows even use real people playing themselves.

At the same time, though, these shows are fictional, as are the characters on them, and they don't exist within the real world. But they do exist in a strong dialogue with our world, often presenting a one-to-one correspondence with familiar landmarks of our reality. This relationship is apparent in the genre's contemporary wellspring: Gilmore Girls. Though the stylistic fount of the CW teen drama is undoubtedly Dawson's Creek, Gilmore Girls is the uniter, the one that brings them all together. Unintentionally, one assumes, that show was a workshop for male leads on teen dramas: if you dated Rory, the daughter of the lead character, you got your own show. Milo Ventimiglia, who played Rory's first boyfriend Jess, got his own WB show (the sadly-canceled The Bedford Diaries) before moving on to Heroes; Jared Padalecki, who played Rory's second boyfriend Dean, now co-stars in the CW's Supernatural; Chad Michael Murray, who merely had a crush on Rory, nevertheless became the co-star of One Tree Hill. And though he only dated Rory's friend, Adam Brody jumped from Gilmore Girls to the male co-lead on Gossip Girl creator Josh Schwartz's previous show, The OC, where he played a character, Seth Cohen, that Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino has (with some cause) accused of being exactly the same character he played on Gilmore Girls. In other words, it wasn't just that the actor changed shows; the character changed shows as well. Rory's boyfriend moved to Cali.

Now, Schwartz has returned the favor. Though The OC was on Fox, he's put his new teen drama on the CW, practically an acknowledgement that The OC did take place in the CW universe. (Gossip Girl being, after all, basically The OC: East Coast Edition.) And by having a scene early in his new show's pilot wherein three character ride a bus sporting an ad for Smallville on its side, he provides the rope to tie that universe together. If these characters are aware of Smallville, the show on the CW that explicitly takes place outside our reality, that means they might not be aware of the CW's other shows, which would make sense if those shows all took place inside the characters' semi-realistic reality. This is why you can start a series in media res and expect viewers to stay tuned: Gossip Girl is, ultimately, just a continued depiction of the world these viewers have already been watching. We're dropped in the middle of the action because, by watching the CW, we are already in the middle of the action. The pilot might as well have begun with a caption: "Meanwhile, in New York…"

Though it's true that the actors play different characters when they jump to different shows, often the characters are practically identical (even if the names change, most actors in teen dramas are incapable of playing more than one personality). We're still talking about the same people, on the same channel, in the same sorts of situations. It's also true that the characters on different shows don't refer to each other, in the way that the characters in, say, the DC Comics universe do. But they really have no reason to know each other, after all; all the shows deal with fundamentally small-town concerns, even when the small town is the Upper East Side of Manhattan, as it is on Gossip Girl. Why would, say, a girl in Connecticut like Rory Gilmore know about a high school basketball player in North Carolina like Lucas Scott? This is a realistic universe, after all, and these aren't superheroes, but ostensibly regular kids.

Still, these kids all face similar concerns and all seem part of the same social and geographic circle. The OC was an anomaly not just in its choice of channel, but in its choice of milieu: California. The CW's teen drama world is an east coast one, so by setting his new series in New York City, Schwartz is, once again, bringing the world back together, symbolically tying it up. Rory's last boyfriend on Gilmore Girls, Logan, was a rich kid from Manhattan (one as yet without his own series), just like the characters on Gossip Girl; presumably when she would visit the city last season, she could've run into Blair or Serena. But Logan was an Upper West Sider and the girls who gossip are Upper East Siders. The universe includes them all, but by divvying up the characters into separate series, boundaries are created.

And so from its first episode, Gossip Girl makes its intentions clear: it means to perform genre criticism on the very genre in which it is firmly and unironically situated. For example, one of the stranger aspects of the CW's teen dramas is their treatment of sex. For all the teen characters, virginity is a continually fraught subject. Whether or not to have sex for the first time is a question they struggle with over multiple episodes, and often when they do take the plunge something horrible happens--they break up marriages, lose their jobs, fall into ruin. What in real life is generally an awkward and uncomfortable situation you just want to have over with becomes, on the teen drama, an issue of almost secular faith, in which you have to stay pure or face smiting by the CW universe's unseen hand.

On Gossip Girl, Blair ("the dark-haired female lead") keeps trying to lose her virginity to Nate ("the lighter-haired male lead"), her longtime boyfriend. In the context of the teen drama, this is bad enough--the conflict isn't over whether she should lose her virginity, but how fast--and she then compounds the offense by making her attempts in especially trashy ways. To have a character so vigorously and unapologetically pursue sex will not do. But instead of merely punishing her after the fact, we get something even better: for almost seven episodes, the show simply does not allow her to lose her virginity. Every time Blair tries to make it happen with Nate, they're either interrupted, have a fight, or get distracted. On a teen drama, you can't lose your virginity until you've suffered, and by not allowing Blair to lose her virginity outside of the expected narrative, the show comments on the conventions of the genre.

Nate, meanwhile, isn't refusing Blair's advances because he's worried about her making the right decision, but because he's just not that into her. Virginity isn't a big deal to him, either. When Chuck encourages him to "seal the deal" with Blair, Nate responds, "Who says 'seal the deal?'" Secondary male characters on teen dramas, that's who! This is nothing less than an explicit joke about teen dramas' prudish obsession with virginity.

Finally, at the end of one episode, Blair is allowed to lose her virginity. Significantly, though, she does not lose it to Nate, who just dumped her. Instead, she runs off in tears, gets drunk, and loses it in the back of a limo to Chuck Bass, Nate's man-whore best friend. So after she's suffered for her sexual desires, Blair finally gets to have sex, but only in a way that she immediately regrets and that will cause the maximum number of possible complications. To drive the point home, the first scene in the next episode finds Blair in a confessional, telling a priest what she's done--while also admitting that she's not Catholic. But of course! God is not her problem. What she really needs to worry about it the avenging hand of the teen drama.

While it may be commenting upon and even mocking the conventions of its own genre (seriously, I could go on with these), Gossip Girl still utilizes them. By not allowing Blair to have sex until she's suffered for it, the show makes a joke about teen dramas while simultaneously creating the delicious dramatic tension that virginity obsessions can generate. And this sort of intertextual two-edged sword of faking it so real can only happen within the CW's teen drama universe. There's strength in numbers, and by creating a galaxy of teen dramas whose realities could plausibly co-exist, the unrealities that necessarily populate those shows begin to glow with a contextual realism, like photoluminescent fish swarming together in the deep sea to create the illusion of a sun: a mirage, to be sure, but it nevertheless casts a certain light.

Labels: gossip girl, the oc, TV

posted by Mike B. @ 2:56 PM