The Most Completely Absurd Parts Of ‘Gossip Girl’, Ranked
Some real bonkers stuff went down.
When Gossip Girl came into our lives in September 2007, we collectively drooled over the teen soap opera about the scandalous lives of Manhattan’s elite. A show about a group of very attractive and absurdly wealthy trust fund teens living in New York, basically unsupervised? Sign me up.
These kids do not have to deal with things like catching buses, school sport or agonising over which flavour Lip Smackers to buy at the pharmacy — they have personal drivers, Ivy League legacies and pre-sale access to ‘It’ bags. Their next-level schemes were expertly played out and their secrets exposed, all under the omniscient gaze of “Gossip Girl” (yeah, more on that later).
Though the show was appealing because it was basically divorced from reality, the storylines became increasingly convoluted until it somehow seemed plausible that Diana, Nate’s boss/lover, was hired as the editor of a newspaper by his grandfather in order to give him an internship (to be honest, fair), and then pretends to be his best friend Chuck’s biological mother to hide the fact that his father is really alive. Need a flowchart?
Some of these narrative choices were frustrating, and others as gloriously outrageous as Gossip Girl’s MVP Serena’s effortless hair. Here’s a loose ranking, from least to most outrageous.
11. Turning Up Unannounced
In Gossip Girl-land, it is weirdly common for people to just turn up to someone’s house unannounced, often for a brief conversation or sometimes to find they are not even home. This is 100 percent not a thing.
Smartphones are at the very heart of the series — Gossip Girl’s blasts, which everyone reads immediately, punctuate the episodes. So why does no one ever use them to text ahead before spending over half an hour in a car from the Upper East Side across to Brooklyn? (I’m looking at you Lily, who is convincing absolutely no one when she tells Rufus she was just ‘in the area’ with a spare bottle of wine).
10. After-School Cocktails
Upper East Siders do not go out after school for an ‘Ahahaha, I’m so ironic (but not really, I’m just a kid)’ Happy Meal. Oh no, they go to a hotel for cocktails. In a place where the legal drinking age is 21, and you get carded well into your mid-20s, the idea that a group of very underage 15-year-olds regularly went out to drown their sorrows in overpriced cocktails is pretty unconvincing.
9. Success Comes Easy In New York City
I know everyone on this show is rich and all, but it is not this easy to achieve huge career goals in New York. While still in high school, with zero previous bylines, Dan has a story published in The New Yorker. THE NEW YORKER. In print. I mean, come on.
Following a brief conversation by the beach, Serena gets handed a job as a production assistant in LA. At age 15, Jenny sets herself up as a prodigious fashion designer. Nate was maybe 21, and still at college, when he went from a summer internship at the (fake) New York Spectator to Editor-in-Chief.
Join me in laughing until I cry.
8. The Love Child
This storyline is one of the worst — and for an apparent “game changer”, it has absolutely no repercussions and is basically just dropped, never to be spoken of again.
When Rufus finds out Lily gave birth to their son and gave him up for adoption in secret (from his future mother-in-law), we are kind of, sort of shocked. The whole tenuous scaffold of this show is based on lies and secrets, and a long-lost love child is pretty standard in a soap opera. But when they track down his family, they find out that Scott recently died. It seems like an emotive and neat way to tie up the storyline… but, of course, he is alive.
Scott soon turns up in New York to try and “get to know” his family. But not by, you know, contacting them; instead, he makes up a fake last name, pretends to be enrolled at NYU and befriends Vanessa to infiltrate their lives. Not weird and creepy at all, Scott.
7. Bart Bass Faked His Death
This series shows us plebs that money can buy you anything. This includes faking your own death.
Honestly, this is not the weirdest storyline. It gets much, much more ridiculous when Bart Bass reappears restyled as an actual bonafide murderous villain and resorts to infanticide, after apparently risking his life to save his son Chuck previously. (Did anyone really think Chuck was on that plane when it blew up though?)
6. Mistaken Identities
Apparently all you need is a mask covering your eyes and you are instantly unrecognisable. Hello hijinks!
At a masked ball in season one, Nate mistakes Jenny for Serena, confesses his feelings and kisses her — at no point noticing it was a completely different person. This inspires Jenny’s plot to wreak havoc on Serena’s life. Nate suggests he might actually be just a pretty face when Jenny fools him again, even though he’d dated her in the meantime and was currently seeing Serena.
Dan similarly mistakes Juliet for Serena, his one true obsession. How drunk were they?
5. Fake Identities
Free-spirited Carol wanted “out” of the toxic Upper East Side life, but still needed a way to pay for pesky stuff like rent, botox and yoga retreats. Of course, Rhodes women do not work (employment, finances — so déclassé). So, the obvious solution is to secretly gain access to her daughter Charlotte’s trust fund, and make sure she never finds out it even exists by hiring a random actor to pretend to be her. Yikes.
Carol goes on about how toxic and manipulative her family is, seemingly oblivious to the fact she is stealing millions of dollars from her only child who is working as a cater-waiter. Enter Ivy Dickens, who turns up as Charlotte Rhodes, styled like a second-tier version of Serena. Her apparently long lost family happily welcome her into the fold, and she fits right in with her lies and shiny hair. Of course, when the real Charlie turned up (already dating Nate because, of course), they shun her as a disgusting outsider — only the inner circle can get away with lies.
4. Mistaken Identities AND Long-Lost Relatives
Over the series, we learn that a big part of Chuck Bass’s ridiculously overplayed debauched lifestyle developed due to his absent father, who blamed him for his mother’s death during childbirth. Cue the about-turn when she turns up alive — or does she? Seriously, I have to check.
Elizabeth is and then she isn’t, and when she manipulates him to get his hotel because she is in love with his larrikin Uncle Jack, we really hope she isn’t. Later Diana pretends to be his mother, as if that’s still an option.
3. Blair Dated A Noble And A Prince
Gossip Girl loves the fairytale of Prince Charming wandering disguised among the masses so much they used it twice. During season two, Blair dates Lord Marcus, whom she ditches when she finds out he’s getting it on with his stepmother. But this is just a warm-up for season four, when she ends up as a runaway bride from her wedding to the Prince of Monaco.
I’m sorry, what? The real-life fairytale of Mary meeting Frederik — unaware he was her future husband and the Prince of Denmark — has a lot to answer for.
2. Fake Illnesses
This is another soap trope that the Gossip Girl writers took and made their very own brand of ridiculous. Faking illness is a sure-fire way to manipulate people to love you in TV Land, but William van der Woodsen decides, oh no, better to fake his ex-wife’s cancer to make her reliant on him as her doctor and, naturally, lover. Nothing could go wrong with this plan.
1. Dan Is Gossip Girl
When the series finale revealed Dan as Gossip Girl, fans were confused and outraged — it made zero bloody sense. Even Penn Badgley, who played Dan, agreed. Lonely Boy was a target of the site enough times to really screw up the lives of people he apparently loved, especially with blasts about his sister’s virginity and drug dealing. Even more ridiculous is that, when he admitted it, Chuck, Nate, Serena and Blair — whose teenage years had all been a nightmare because of the site — were like: “Meh”.
Even worse, when Dan confessed to Serena that he did it to stalk her, her response was basically, “Aww, marrying my stalker. Cute!”
Seriously. This guy??
—
Kate Robertson is not that kind of doctor. She is a part-time academic who also writes on art and culture, and is currently working on a passion project about women in horror. She tweets at @final_fatale.