They Should've Let Me Write Gossip Girl

by Sienna Axe

 

*Spoilers for Gossip Girl, including the identity of the titular gossiping girl*

 

Gossip Girl is not a good show, and I’m not interested in pretending that it is. But there’s something so tantalizing about it. The early seasons especially are like 2007 in a bottle, and watching them is like a lullaby. Here, in front of my eyes, the older kids baby me thought were so cool are preserved in amber, and they are the stupidest fucking people on Earth. It’s so, so awesome.

But—and just hear me out here—I would argue that with a few adjustments, it could have been a hell of a lot better. Now, I’m not the only one who thinks this—the show, especially through the later seasons, has some glaring issues—but I think, in general, we’re looking in the wrong direction. I think that all the writers really needed to save Gossip Girl was a little foresight. Think of it like dominoes: to make the whole show better, we have to start a chain reaction way back at the beginning. And so, in the spirit of this, allow me to take you to season 1, episode 4: “Bad News Blair.”

This is a Gossip Girl classic: we open on a Blair dream sequence (a hallmark of many of GG’s better episodes). Blair and Serena start the episode newly reconciled, spend it fighting, and end it friends again. Eleanor Waldorf manages to squeeze in some terrible parenting. Nate and Chuck have one of the early seasons’ more insane b-plots (The Lost Weekend; Carter Baizen’s underground gambling ring). But we’re not here to talk about any of that today. We’re here to talk about the scene pictured above: the writers’ brief, later-aborted attempt at a friendship between Dan and Blair.

Dan (Penn Badgley) and Blair (the incomparable Leighton Meester) are two people who, like it or not, are uniquely enthralled by the myth of the Upper East Side—enough to let it consume them completely. For Blair, it’s that she doesn’t know who she is without it; for Dan, it’s that something about it (beyond Serena Van der Woodsen, for fuck’s sake) fascinates him enough to build and maintain an anonymous empire around it. Unlike Jenny, however (or Georgina, or even Vanessa!), they’re able to keep it together enough not to implode from it.

It’s this shared trait that makes them so compatible (fight me! HE WROTE HER FIRST HUSBAND'S WEDDING VOWS!), but it’s also what keeps them from each other for so long. They’re from two different worlds; neither of them can be seen with the other without compromising their position in the Constance Billard St. Jude’s social pyramid. But they meet in the middle in two important ways: Blair, by going downtown to catch repertory screenings of niche movies; Dan, by being Gossip Girl.

I’m just gonna get this out of the way: I think it’s perfect that Dan is Gossip Girl. There were no better options! It’s not out of character! He’s just a little crazy! And I’m obsessed with it. And I think (know) that if the writers had known this earlier, Gossip Girl could’ve been the best show of all time. Or, well. Maybe just the best show on the CW.

Which brings me back to the hallway moment. After Blair’s mother, Eleanor (Margaret Colin) schemes to replace her own daughter with Serena as a model for her clothing line, Dan finds her sitting alone in the hallway (a very un-Blair-like activity!). He talks about his mom abandoning her family to live in Hudson; she listens without even a single jab at his family’s (clearly very expensive) cheap Brooklyn loft. It’s a Blair we hadn’t seen before, and it’s one we very rarely see in the rest of the series. The fact that Dan can bring this out of her is odd, but not unwelcome. In my ideal Gossip Girl, the writers would have spent the first two seasons carefully slotting in these no-man’s-land moments, adding some needed texture to the show’s irritatingly black-and-white social logic.

The rest of my GG goes like this: the show goes on as planned until season 3, when Blair (and the audience) finds out Dan’s secret. This complicates things significantly: suddenly, Dan’s biggest asset in the Upper East Side is compromised, and the biggest validator of Blair’s status (for better and for worse) is revealed to be the very thing she looks down on most. Not to mention that Blair’s life was going so well! She and Chuck (😐) had just gotten together after seasons of buildup! But, like many times before, her girlboss tendencies are the priority. She blackmails Dan into teaming up with her, resulting in the best dynamic in the show. We get episodes of Blair posting tips without permission, long deliberations on who gets what day (and what information is off limits), and the most egregious examples of Gossip-Girl-for-personal-gain the show has ever seen (yes, even more than Serena’s brief stint in the chair).

Meanwhile, Chuck steadily gets more angry and jealous, as Chuck is wont to do. He doesn’t understand why Blair suddenly has to spend so much time “working.” Eventually, in an episode where Blair and Dan are probably fighting over something stupid, someone sends in a Gossip Girl tip that they’ve been hanging out at some café downtown (this is later revealed to have been Vanessa, who’s upset Dan is compromising his nonexistent good-Brooklyn-boy morals or something). Dan posts it, because fuck Blair for [posting an unverified tip/hazing his little sister/using him for a scheme without his consent]. When Chuck sees this, he snaps, and Blair has to choose between telling the truth (and keeping him) and lying (and keeping Gossip Girl—and, by extension, Dan). She lies, telling herself that it’s for the sake of Gossip Girl’s power. Dan is relieved, but doesn’t quite know why. There’s a small but important shift that happens, both in their relationship and in their place in the social climate. It’s the most interesting thing that has ever happened in the show.

The series intersects with its original timeline in season 5, when Dan and Blair actually do get together, and it happens much in the same way—but with the appropriate buildup, it makes sense. And this is crucial: they actually end up together. When Gossip Girl’s identity is revealed, they take joint responsibility. Chuck kills himself, probably, or else ends up with Eva. Serena ends up with Carter Baizen, who never got sent to that oil rig. Nate gets really good at acoustic guitar. Jenny realizes she’s a lesbian and never comes back from Europe. Bart Bass stays dead. Ivy and Lola don’t exist. Rufus and Lily have no reason to get a divorce now that the show isn’t trying to shoehorn their collective stepchildren into a weird relationship. Vanessa runs a moderately-successful film festival and never thinks about high school again. Eric is somehow both a video essay guy and dating Jonathan Groff. Georgina is the president of the United States and has no custody of Milo. All is right with the world.