OMD! (That’s French for OMG, not a reference to British synth-pop act Orchestral Manoevres in the Dark.) We’re in Paris, it’s the tail end of summer, and we are to assume that the girls have been existing in relative stasis ever since jetting off in May for some Us Time. If we didn’t, this would be a really insufferable show about terribly shallow people. Gossip Girl season premieres are rarely riveting, it’s a lot of place setting for what we can be assured will be an at least intermittently entertaining season. But before the first commercial break we learn that Serena will be staying in New York and attending Columbia with Blair (after the latter’s disastrous and totally endearing stint at NYU,) which means that Gossip Girl will continue to draw its energy from the Energizer battery that is Serena and Blair’s fucked-up friendship, and it can’t possibly be all bad. They aren’t just BFFs, they are symbiotic organisms.Īfter an explosive third season finale that almost made me forget what a chore the twenty-odd episodes that had prededed it had been, the fourth season plunks us right back in snoozeland, with our front-runner intrigues looking to be Dan and Georgina’s baby (gross), some 40-year-old looking newcomer named Juliet (Gossip Girl’s New York City is just white as Friends’!), and Where in The World Is Chuck Bass (which, honestly, is all we really care about).

We are never meant to doubt that Blair and Serena need each other. And yes, there is shoe shopping and boyfriend stealing, but at the end of the day the show treats such ventures as sport, usually resolved and put aside by the end of an episode.

Say what you will about Josh Schwartz’s Manhattan teen (now early twenties) fantasy Gossip Girl, but the fact that the central concern of its past three seasons has been the female-bromance of Blair Waldorf and Serena Van Der Woodsen (Leighton Meester and Blake Lively) is singular and rarely acknowledged. Friendships between girls, we are told, are supposed to be all shoe shopping and boyfriend stealing, with none of the pathologically frail in-betweenness and genuine affection that more accurately mirrors reality. We have “BFFs” and “frenemies” but these winking, barbed terms fail to capture the need-you-more-than-I’d-care-to-admit aspect of the masculine variety. It’s rather telling that in all of the blogoverse, twittersphere, and otherwise internet-affected tweenspeak that has flourished like its own American patois over the last decade, there is no convenient neologism for the intricately bound female friendship, a la the regretfully ubiquitous “bromance”.

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