Point taken.

I’ll check out your other works. Good work!

In terms of the contention that Gossip Girl lacks sufficient depth for overthinking, I would tend to agree that there isn’t necessarily much that is Dostoyevskian about GG (of course if any of y’all do see Dostoyevskian themes in GG, please chime in). The “Crime and Punishment” allusion in the title was more a reference to Beccaria’s treatise on criminal justice and the related literatures in both Criminology and Applied Ethics. From this perspective (and from a broader sociological perspective), I think that there is frequently much more to the show than meets the eye.

Of course, I’d also be lying if I said that I watch the show for purely intellectual reasons. I started watching the show about a year ago (halfway through season one) because my fiancee is a fan, and got sucked into because it is often quite funny and occasionally well scripted and acted. In particular, the performances by Ed Westwick and Leighton Meester (Chuck and Blair) alone place it on a level apart from many other teen soaps.

I’d like to see more of how your mind works but in the mediums of music and films, rather than the world of nothingness that is Gossip Girl.

About the 80s spinoff- I’m not sad that this is dead. Based on what I saw in last night’s episode, it just didn’t work. In fact it was so off that it made me even the weakest GG episode seem great by comparison. It was pretty deeply flawed across the board- the writing, casting, acting, and production design just were not at the level of the original.

1) The 80′s GG spinoff may be dead: http://www.deadlinehollywooddaily.com/that-gossip-girl-spinoff-dead-at-cw/

2) The worldview in Gossip Girl is blatantly aristocratic. It doesn’t even pull its punches. Dan comes in for non-ironic ridicule when he takes a job as a cater-waiter, the implication being that he’s a class traitor, or else never belonged in the aristocracy to begin with.

3) Gossip Girl sees membership in the aristocracy as a matter of essential worth — an intrinsically better class of person — rather than as a benefit conferred by hard work or even luck. The social order — which, with its hierarchical arrangement, smacks of feudalism — is objectively ordained.

4) I think this accounts for the view of the police not as an autonomous arm of the state serving public aims but as a private instrumental force serving the private — indeed, not just private but personal — aims of the aristocracy. The police — and, by extension, the law and the norms of society — may govern everyone else, but Serena, Blair, Chuck, etc. are above that.

5) Is there an inconsistency here? The show seemed to suggest that there was a moral imperative for Nate to turn his father in for securities fraud, meaning that it was right for the father to be subject to the same laws as everyone else.

5a) But recall that Nate’s dad is not the Vanderbilt; his mother is. In a way, the father’s business failure and subsequent resort to fraud is seen as evidence of his intrinsic unworthyness.

6) Serena’s focus on retribution is a convincing characterization, since it accords with the developmental psychology of adolescence, viz. newfound (and thus zealous and absolute) devotion to abstract ideals like fairness.

7) There is a lack of faith in social institutions that I think goes beyond the aristocracy’s viewing the police as simply a private paramilitary force. Serena and Blair often see themselves as the only force that can right a perceived imbalance in the world. Part of this is due to Belinkie’s First Law of Kids’ Movies — in its most Derridean formulation, “All minors are always already unaccompanied.” — http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0488658/ and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYhbQ4Xvdvk (q.v.).

But there’s more to it than that. I think that these kids understand that when you live outside the law you forfeit its protections.