Tuesday, September 2, 2008

THE IRONY IS THAT IT'S A SHOW ABOUT A WRITER: During the first season of The N's Beyond the Break (one of the worst shows on television, and I mean that in the best possible way), there was a regular two-minute-or-so commercial featurette that ran in the middle of each episode. Sponsored by some feminine product (I cannot remember which, I am proud to say), it was momentarily indistinguishable from the show itself, in that it featured a generically pretty cast of bikini-clad surfer girls draped over the Hawaiian scenery while debating the merits of various boys with the solemnity of Yalta conferees. The most memorable thing about these commercials is that they sounded as if the dialogue were overheard in one language, manhandled into a simulacrum of English by outsourced translators, then delivered phonetically by head trauma survivors.

Take that model, move it to the Hamptons, and replace the swimwear with diaphanous period gowns, and you have the Season 2 premiere of Gossip Girl. This is a show whose dialogue frequently consists for long stretches only of sardonic asides, and for other scenes only of pithy retorts unmoored from anything to which to retort.

If you were unable to follow this linguistic pointillism, or if you happened to miss this episode, let me tie it up for you: Last season expended prodigious effort, culminating at the :50 mark in the last episode, in bringing together several couples (the princess and the pauper; the delicate flower of a prince and the sassy handmaiden; the ineffectual bitch and the guy who dresses like a circus clown) and then spent the last 10 minutes junking it all and confusingly mixing and matching the couples. This episode spent about the same amount of time unjumbling them, as if the cliffhangers never happened, except that in the A-plot, the circus clown doesn't yet get the girl because when he tries to say "I love you" it comes out like when Fonzie tries to say "I'm sorry." And there was a prince pretending to be an American commoner and also Madchen Amick looking like she's aged all of three years since Twin Peaks. And all of this with an un-Schwartzian tone: if Chuck often feels like Elmer Bernstein, Gossip Girl is all Fall Out Boy, mopey and self-indulgent.

Oh, and that reminds me -- there was some bad music. As a guy whose taste is eerily in lockstep with the soundtracks of The OC and Chuck (Apples in Stereo, Of Montreal, Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, New Pornographers, etc.), I find the music on Gossip Girl befuddlingly dull. So, to sum up, welcome back TV; I hope you get better quickly.

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