'Gossip Girl frenemies Leighton Meester and Blake Lively have closed a deal to guest-star in a November sweeps episode of NBC's increasingly stunt-happy 30 Rock, sources confirm to me exclusively. The dynamic duo will play — prepare to laugh 'till you piddle — former high school classmates of Liz Lemon's in a flashback sequence that reveals a shocking and deeply ironic truth about Tina Fey's morally superior alter ego: She was a Mean Girl!' [EW]
"And so she, Serena, came to, cognizant of the reciprocations and thus revisitations to Billard—i must i must yes a bodys got to travel in heat mother idont hate billard idont hate billard idont."
-"William Faulkner Reviews Season One of Gossip Girl" (Mcsweeney's)
The ratings are in! The ratings are on it! Gossip Girl survived, and indeed flourished, during its second season premiere last night. Despite that stupid plotline with Blair and the British lord, GG saw a 6% increase among adults 18-49 for a total of and pulled in a total of 3.4 million viewers.
The result of an extensive promotional campaign, both IRL and online (*cough*), this is good news for the channel. might Dawn Ostroff & Co. have managed to turn Gossip Girl, and tonight's premiere of the revamped 90210, into defibrillator to overcome the flat lining of the network? No longer will the endless seasons of One Tree Hill keep The CW alive all by its lonesome.
Of course, you'll have to wait till tomorrow when the 90210 ratings are in to find out if lightning strikes twice for offensive ad campaigns.
The CW network found a new contingent to exasperate via racy ad campaign, just in time for the premieres of their two biggest shows, Gossip Girl and the new 90210. No longer content to just piss off the Parent Television Council by using the PTC's disapproval to shill GG (which returned to primetime last night), Dawn Ostroff's teen scandal channel has chosen a new target for garnering free negative publicity: Brooklyn's Hasidic Jewish community.
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The Parents Television Council is ruining quality cable. Not because their cause is bad, exactly — we like protecting kids too! — but because networks like The CW realized they could turn all those wagging fingers into little dollar signs. How? By incorporating all the negative soundbites the PTC handed out about Gossip Girl into marketing so clever, the spots themselves got press.
Sell the people sex and scandal, with a seal of disapproval from the "authority."
Which is how you get those ads on the sides of buses that say "Mind-blowingly Inappropriate" while promoting the series. Cute trick, but now the CBS-Time Warner network hopes indignant lighting will strike twice with their remake of 90210: CONTINUED »
Chace Crawford, he of your dreamy Gossip Girl fantasies, is right at the point of his career where any wrong move could derail his future fortunes. That's why his publicist has been so busy planting items about him flirting with girls to counter all those reports of him playing with boys. It's also why there's no way in hell he'd lend his face to a dating site called WooMe.com, whose tagline "Find guys and girls near you" is another gay joke waiting to happen. But WooMe has Chace's face being used to promote its webcam-to-webcam service in the same way a certain Chinese pantyhose company claimed Jennifer Aniston as its spokesperson. That is, without authorization. [SFG]
That ad there, above? For The CW's Gossip Girl, the low-ratings show that everybody can't stop talking about? The show's creator, Josh Schwartz, actually hates the way the network has gone about pushing the show on viewers, taking advantage of the Parents Television Council's general frustration with its means of teaching young people about the birds and the bees. "The network came up with that, and I just stand back. I don’t want anything to do with it. … When you drive by a poster for your show and it says, ‘Every parent’s nightmare,’ you have mixed feelings." Ya know, that's sort of a mind-blowingly inappropriate thing to say.
'People think Chace is gay, and thought I was gay, that we were humping. It’s not true, but hilarious. People project their fantasies onto people. I’ve never been someone who makes it my objective to go out and pick up chicks. But I’ve met some fantastic ladies here. You know those amazing conversations where you find yourself in a café talking until 2 a.m. and never see them again.' —Ed Westwick on his non-sexual roommate relationship [P6 Magazine, Earlier]
For all the hype, influence on the fashion industry, and magazine spreads, Mad Men is not the ratings draw you might've been led to believe.
In fact, it "continues to shed its audience at an alarming rate," intones Michael Starr. While the second season premiered on July 27 with 2.1 million viewers, last Sunday's episode averaged just 1.1 million (and a season low of 514k in the 18-49 demo).
None of this should be terribly surprising if you've been paying attention to the hype-vs-ratings measurements of late. CONTINUED »
Ugh, LC. What's to say about the unnecessary star of The Hills (season premiere next Monday you guys), except that she sucks and yet is endlessly fascinating the way the minutiae of those mean girls in high school were endlessly fascinating. Except those girls wore American Eagle or Abercrombie & Fitch and had run-down Toyotas, and LC has a $3,000 Chanel bag, and last season bought herself a house for $2.36 million dollars. MainStreet.com — the mix up of celebrity and finance — thinks "Being L.C." costs some serious change, but the hair, styling, clothing, and goodies are usually provided by MTV or marketers looking to attach themselves to her "brand," part of which involves getting dolled up enough to look gender-ambiguous.
Please stay on the other coast, LC; in New York, even the cast of Gossip Girl would knife you for charging nearly $200 for this literal sack of crap you call a clothing line.
LC, the star of the number one show (used in Jihad-training videos on why America is the great devil) The Hills, wants to branch out. She told on E! Online, “I love Gossip Girl, I just love it. It’s so gossipy and superficial. It’s amazing.” She want on to mention that she'd like to do a guest-spot, ala Lydia Hearst last season. The problem is Hearst, while not exactly Katherine Hepburn, has never given viewers reason to think that she plausibly can't act, and LC has spent her teenage and early adulthood proving that she is incapable of any emotion besides pouting and having really shiny hair (that's her favorite emotion). After the jump, our two favorite examples of LC trying to convey a sentiment ….
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High school can be a tricky social field to navigate. Luckily, we have shows like Gossip Girl, which give viewers a totally realistic account of what it's like to be a hyper-sexualized trust fund baby in New York, and whose characters are the guideposts for America's youth. Based on that thesis, let's count the subtle references to prep school etiquette in the Observer's 2,000 words on 15-year-old starlet Taylor Momsen, who plays the Brooklyn-poor social-climber Jenny Humphry. This exercise guarantees to educate us about tween culture. CONTINUED »
While Chace Crawford deals with industry backlash for switching agencies and trying to get more money out of his breakout role in the ratings disaster show Gossip Girl, two of his co-stars are dealing with SCANDALS OF THEIR OWN: skipping out on charity events they RSVP'd for but didn't show up to. CONTINUED »
Remember when the gossip columns were filled with plants about Chace Crawford — the Gossip Girl star whose publicist wasn't pleased that he was being labeled a big 'mo — and his female relations?
Then rumors started that Crawford and co-star/roommate Ed Westwick shared more than just scripts?
Enter this obvious plotline: Gossip columns are beginning to report Westwick's own lady exploits: "The Gossip Girl guy was 'seriously making out with some random chick' at Lit bar Wednesday night, says a spy. 'When the two left together, Ed was leading her by the hand. He was moving quick, but he had time to wink at a hot brunette before slipping out.'"
Gossip Girl costars and roommates Ed Westwick and Chace Crawford can’t get enough of one another’s company:
The twosome showed up at a recent show by Brit popsters The Ting Tings, and a spy says “they were never more than a foot apart. It was freaky.
Whew. The CW is finally ending what they've been calling an "experiment" — that ridiculous decision to stop streaming episodes of Gossip Girl on its website for fear of cannibalizing its television audience. After kicking off the second part of season one without free web streams, Nielsen's numbers for the show didn't exactly go up by anything significant. Instead, they did this.
To go along with its tres racy ad campaign — complete with Parents Television Council warnings — The CW has releases a handful of 12-second clips to get you ready for Gossip Girl's Sept. 1 return. They're loaded with one-liner soundbites, so you'll have something to impress your friends with instead of ending every sentence with "xoxo, Gossip Girl." [The CW]
Remember Gossip Girl's tres provocative "OMFG" campaign from April, which kicked off the second part of the show's first season amidst a round of buzz, especially when the Parents Television Council got in a huff over The CW's marketing department insinutiating the word "fuck?"
Good news! More rebellious marketing materials for a show about teen sex, teen drinking, teen drug use, and teen wealth. And conservative groups are really going to hate the ones below. CONTINUED »
Ann Shoket is not on the good side of Gossip Girl Blake Lively. The blonde starlet — tragically seen in the sequel to The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants — pops up on Vanity Fair and Cosmopolitan this month, but her cover role on Shoket's Seventeen has her pissed. Even her rep says she's not happy about it!
Except, well, this isn't the worst cover we've ever seen Lively on. In fact, we have three candidates that are at least equally terrible. CONTINUED »
Though Gossip Girl is in re-runs and will not return to The CW until Sept. 1, the show's cast is spending the summer shooting the episodes you're going to concern yourselves with when season two appears this fall. In a brilliant twist of newspegs, this allows the show to be fair game on the culture beat year-round, which explains how articles like this one — about how the show influences the fashions that tween, teen, and twentysomething girls are buyings — get printed. That what S, B, or little Jenny wear impacts what young girls are wearing, and what the stores they shop at will be stocking, it of little surprise; designer Stefani Greenspan, who creates the Priorities line sold at Macy’s, Dillard’s and Bloomingdale’s, says GG "definitely" influenced her collection of "trim blazers lined in men’s tie fabric, oversized cardigans and ruffled plaid shirts with gold buttons."
The real Gossip Girl twist is that while designers are paying tidy sums to The CW to get their duds on the show's characters for some heavy hitting product placement, it's the incessant paparazzi coverage of the show — with cameras following them all over Manhattan and the Hamptons — that's impacting its "trend-ability." CONTINUED »
