It may have already done so last season, but I was willing to suspend judgment while the Constance Billard/St. Jude's kids adjusted to college, although just based on their college selections alone, it was hard to believe that all the members of such an ambitious crew would stay in New York City, and not one of them called in a favor to get into Yale or Brown.
The first season of GG was phenomenal - a portrait of power brokers in training as young men and women. Living in New York, I was more susceptible to its charms than The O.C., which to me just looked like undifferentiated TV Southern California - I could have just as easily been watching a rerun of CHiPs! (Okay, maybe not). By contrast, NYC was depicted in a glorious light - hey, look, there's the Agnes B store! Wow, Central Park in the fall is gorgeous! - and if there were minor gaffes - there they go making Williamsburg and DUMBO into one neighborhood again! - they could be easily overlooked because the underlying message of the show straddled the line between suggesting that children need their parents no matter what the income bracket, but with enough money, a child can override the need for parenting to some extent, as in the case of Chuck Bass.
So now Serena is back with Nate, a union that has about as much fizz as day old Fresca with the cap left off. One of the conundrums this show faces is that there are few men that can hold their own with Serena and succeed in containing her to some extent. I thought Aaron Rose was a decent foil for her, but the show is dead in the water if Serena is happily hooked with someone, so they got rid of him, awkwardly. The rest of her swains? Boring, boring, boring, zero chemistry. It might be good if she discovered that she had some bizarre (but telegenic) fetishes. Such fetishes are plausible given that she killed someone "by accident" during a drug-fuelled threeway.
It seems that the show's writers don't know what to do with Serena anymore. Given her haphazard mothering by Lily, she really should be completely adrift and trying to figure things out, preferably with a shopping and/or drug addiction. Let her be a glorious, entertaining mess for a while. But no, Jenny gets to do that, and I find her escapades with the Belgian drug dealer, etc. totally boring. Sorry, she just doesn't have what it takes (looks, alpha-femaleness) to be top girl, and I resent the show continuing to assert that she is. She's a cool beta-female who isn't afraid to blaze her own trail, but that thread of her character seems to have been lost.
The latest insertion into the show of Billy Baldwin is another mixed bag. The device by which he was introduced into the show (only Dr. van der Woodsen can save his ex-wife from cancer!) was one step short of evil amnesiac robot twins, and I deplore the show's decline from a smart, accurate depiction of upper middle class/upper class New York City life to third rate telenovela. Baldwin is Serena's long lost father and I was always under the impression that he was out of her life because he was off partying. Suddenly it's revealed that he's a saintly physician for Doctors without Borders...or is he really an evil doctor manipulating his sick ex-wife's prescription in order to win her back (or not? who knows? Tune in next week!)
I'm happy to see that Billy Baldwin, as he's gotten older, has grown into a comic persona quite similar to his older brother's, and it really might be fun to have both Baldwins go head to head on 30 Rock, but his cartoony, seemingly villainous, seemingly altruistic Dr. van der Woodsen is badly out of place of Gossip Girl. GG has never been about irony or humor, and Baldwin's relish in playing such an ambiguous character is sadly out of place on this show, which has truly lost steam. Hang it up before it becomes any more ridiculous than it already is.
No comments:
Post a Comment