“Gossip Girl”: A Sinful Delight

Naughty, unrealistic dialogue, mesmerizing wardrobe, and totally effable good-thing-they’re-not-really-in-high-school boys make Gossip Girl a weekly habit of Headmistress Ivey. Surprisingly more tame than the book series, the televised adaptation won her over from the beginning with clever puns and a New York City landscape. She finds nothing hotter than a few well-dressed foxes doing all sorts of misbehaving.

Nate Archibald has mastered looking perpetually hot and confused. He’s aristocratic Upper East Side gorgeousness with the most pristine flat-ironed, side-swept bangs. He is far and away the most useless character on the show which is a shame considering he’s one of the integral four in the books. Nate is so stupid and earnest. He’ll spend an entire episode trotting to Brooklyn to convince poor people like Vanessa to take the SATs like he has nothing better to do! He looks amazing in the preppiest of prep-wear like a freshly laundered white and navy rugby shirt. I’d want him to take me sailing and then walk me home before he has to go bail his dad out of the slammer for insider trading. This scene (speaking no words works in his favor) had me aroused for weeks and confused because no high schooler should be so fine. But then I remember it’s just a show and Chace Crawford is perfectly legal and I want to squeeze his bicep and more.

Dan Humphrey wishes, man. I don’t think I’ve ever watched a scene in Gossip Girl that Dan hasn’t ruined with his dumbass face. His cheekbones are so severe and he constantly looks like he’s sucking through a straw. I can’t stand how he trips over his words and then squeezes his eyes shut tight and shakes his head. And all his sortof-Jewish, Woody Allen neuroses are overkill. They’re trying to make him the next Seth Cohen and I hated Seth Cohen. He’s so effing self-righteous, he thinks he can dump Serena van der Woodsen after he cheated on her and still managed to blame Serena! I mean, so she killed someone — big whoop! Take your judgmental bullshit back to the G train. I will admit, though, that it was pretty hot when he nailed his teacher. I give his silhouette credit for being 23545295 x more attractive than his face and making that scene bearable.

Rufus Humphrey and his flannel shirts are so endearing and lame and he’s just the coolest dad ever. His kids, Dan and Jenny, are always busting his chops for fronting some Gin Blossoms-soundalike band in the 90s but he was fiiine and scored Lily van der Woodsen in the process. Too bad he lost her to numerous husbands. But his mop of brown hair and his scruffy face are so charming. Plus he wears leather cuff bracelets and chokers and spends most of any given episode standing at the kitchen counter chopping something. He pines and pines for Lily and even has sex with her the night before she marries Bart Bass! What a gent. He lost me, though, when he found out he knocked up Lily in 1989 or whenever the heck it was and was determined to go out searching for their now-grown son and blamed Lily with all that, “It was my kid, too!” bull shit. Move on, Rufus, and concentrate on keeping an eye on your daughter who’s letting downtown hipsters take pictures of her in her bra.

Chuck Bass is hands-down, the greatest television character ever created. He’s amazing. His wardrobe is insane, like seriously. If you plucked someone from the looney bin and told them they could wear whatever they wanted from a warehouse full of clothes, they would pick something Chuck Bass would wear on a Sunday afternoon. He has such a strange, almost Asian, almost Jimmy Fallon-looking face that’s the classic example of ugly/sexy. His mouth curls up in the corners and he can go from looking crazy to looking sad to boyish to rapey with a simple move of an eyebrow. I would do him while he wears an ascot and nothing more. Chuck has no respect for women, he tried to rape Serena in a kitchen and Jenny Humphrey on a rooftop in the same episode, he took Blair’s virtue and wound up in a Thai opium den with hookers and I STILL want him. In season two of Gossip Girl, he has taken to talking through his nose and being unecessarily intense with everything he says. I love him with Blair, I love him not with Blair, and I want him to tease me endlessly and make me wait for it.