Gossip Girl has always held a special place in my heart. Among many things, it gave us Blake Lively and Penn Badgley. In addition to them, my obsession with hair bands is a direct result of watching this show at a very young age. It has been 13 years since Gossip Girl first aired, and like many of its predecessors within the TV teen drama genre, when inspecting it under the lens of 2020, it did not age well.
Blair Waldorf
Where should I begin? Perhaps the greatest offender of all of Gossip Girl is Blair Waldorf. Her entire character was pretty much based on being classist. For example, she looked down on Dan Humphrey because he was poor and he lived in the outer boroughs a.k.a Williamsburg. In reality, Dan lived in a multimillion dollar loft, and his father was a former rockstar who ran a very successful art gallery. According to Blair Waldorf’s logic, if you are not the product of generational wealth and do not own three Birkin bags, then you are a pauper. After being rejected from Yale and having to belittle herself by attending NYU, she quickly learned that most people have morals. She would sabotage every relationship her ex boyfriend would be in and then get mad when he did the same. Blair is an uptight and proud elitist whose only redeeming characteristics were her outfits and sharp comebacks.
Nate Archibald
No matter how much I love this himbo and would love to say he is unproblematic, he too made some problematic decisions. One of these decisions included when he committed fraud and then had the audacity to blame the Justice Department for doing their jobs. He might be a himbo, but was it necessary for him to be that gullible? Everytime anyone wanted to manipulate him he would fall for it. He also dated a high schooler and didn’t see anything really wrong with it! For the most part, he really did try to be a good guy, but he was just too dumb to know any better.
Dan Humprey
He was Gossip Girl. Enough said. I do not think I can ever forgive the writers for this. He literally made an entire career out of blackmailing his “so called” friends! He had the “I’m a nice guy” routine going for him, but in reality he did not mind selling out his friends to get ahead.
Chuck Bass
If I had to make a menu for which rich person to eat first, he would be first. Calling him entitled does not begin to encompass Chuck Bass. For a majority of the first season, his catchphrase whenever someone asked him why he deserved or wanted something was “I’m Chuck Bass.” The worst part was that people took this as a valid argument and gave him whatever he wanted!
In the first ever episode, he tried to sexually assault Jenny and he just disregarded this until later in the second season. His overall treatment of women in the first two seasons. He would treat every girl he dated, and there were a lot, with little to no respect. In his eyes, they were there to please him and had no actual use for them beyond that.
Serena Van Der Woodsen
She literally had a new boyfriend every other week and treated them like literal trash!
Speaking about boyfriends, she dated Nate’s married cousin, left him for Nate and then cheated on Nate with Dan. All of this drama happened within a span of four episodes! She also tried to seduce a teacher and which ultimately got him sent to prison. Just like Nate, she tries to be a good person but she often lets her own selfish needs get in the way of that.
It would not be an understatement to say that these characters were not role model material. What do you expect from a CW teen drama that doesn’t involve vampires and witches? If I’m being honest here, yes Gossip Girl had a lot of problems, but I still want to sit on the Met steps before school.