Gossip Girl Captures The Bizarre Energy Of The Aughts Like No Other Show

During the final moments of Gossip Girl’s 2007 pilot episode, the ethereal plinks and spacey guitar riffs that open Angels & Airwaves’ 2006 song “The Gift” ring out as Blake Lively’s It Girl Serena van der Woodsen leaves a party hand-in-hand with Penn Badgley’s Lonely Boy Dan Humphrey. As I re-watch it in 2024 at 34 years old, the song reaches into my chest cavity and grabs my beating heart, urging it to quicken its pace and remember what it felt like to kiss a boy while that song played tinnily over a car radio.

I’m 16 again, and life stretches out before me full of passion and promise. Maybe one day I’ll be an It Girl living in New York City, and I’ll buck relationship trends to fall in love with a brooding, artistic young man with an impressively lush amount of chest hair. Maybe I’ll hand-sew my own dress based off of an expensive designer gown so I can wear something fabulous to a fancy Upper East Side party. Maybe I’ll go to college, get a degree, graduate without debt, and find a job that’ll afford me enough money to buy my own house. It’s all possible, right? Wrong.

Rewatching Gossip Girl in 2024

Gossip Girl, based on the young adult novels of the same name by Cecily von Ziegesar, aired from 2007 to 2012 on what was then known as The CW (though you can watch all of it on streaming service Max right now). It straddled the 2008 financial crisis, but remained steadfastly embedded in the glorious excess of Manhattan’s elite. Now, it serves as a window into the world as it was back then, before the housing market collapse, the election of Barack Obama and subsequent conservative backlash, the reign of the iPhone, or the proliferation of social media. Watching it now is equal parts shocking and satisfying—it’s so unabashedly, awfully catty and controversial that I’m surprised it stayed on-air for as long as it did.

The aforementioned sweet, hopeful Gossip Girl moment comes just seconds after an attempted sexual assault by Bad Boy Chuck Bass (Ed Westwick, who had sexual assault allegations levied against him back in 2017) on Dan’s younger sister Jenny (Taylor Momsen), and right before Kristen Bell’s snarky Gossip Girl narrator reminds us that Serena will be aggressively bullied by Chuck and her former best friend Blair Waldorf (Leighton Meester) once school starts again on Monday. It embodies what makes Gossip Girl such a pristine snapshot of the aughts: the casual violence against women, the glorification of underage drinking and drug use, the brutal dashing of hopes and dreams, the material excess, the almost ceaseless needle-drops of your iTunes top 25 most played, the quick-witted, shrewdly sarcastic dialogue of disaffected teens. Nothing will shove you into a time capsule, hastily input “2007” into its console, and unceremoniously ship you back nearly 20 years more than Gossip Girl.

Image: CW Network / Courtesy Everett Collection / Warner Bros. Television

It’s a weird feeling, watching this as an adult with student loans living in a Brooklyn apartment I can barely afford. There is a casual cruelty to Gossip Girl that defined so much media from that era, that helped create today’s internet culture in which horrible insults can be lobbed at you from any direction. After all, this is the same era in which emo music reigned supreme, music in which self-proclaimed sensitive boys demonized young women who didn’t love them, music that dominated my every day. Girls who grew up in the early aughts internalized these ideologies—slut-shaming, body-shaming, status-shaming, style-shaming—and carry them still today.

That’s why the 2021 Gossip Girl reboot was doomed to fail (and fail it did, after just two seasons, though at least it took a page out of the OG’s book and was largely shot on-location in NYC). It couldn’t recreate the cruelty of the original series without being “canceled,” and it couldn’t present a neutered version of what made the aughts show so popular without coming off toothless. Like a scientific phenomenon that can only be replicated under the most specific conditions, Gossip Girl could have only ever existed from 2007 to 2012.

I’m 34, sure, but just an hour with Gossip Girl transports me back into the body of my teenage self, bringing with it a surge of emotions and memories that crashes over me like a sewage-filled wave from the East River. But at least now when I watch it, I know for sure that Chuck Bass is a fucking scumbag, and that you should never wear a straw fedora with a cocktail dress. That’s growth.

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