Last week, Gossip Girl took a charming weekend trip, eschewing upper-crust Manhattan for upper-crust New Haven.

Though exteriors were actually shot at Columbia in Harlem (which, admittedly, seems farther away from the show’s fantasy upper east side than charming and quaint little Connecticut is), the characters were headed for a weekend of schmoozing and partying at that most telegenic of Ivies, Yale.

(Full disclosure: All of this blog’s writers met as classmates at that very college.)

So how does a real Yalie find his alma mater’s Gossip-ified TV depection? (Hint: less realistic than it’s Gilmore-ified version.) Read on to find out.

The last episode of Gossip Girl continued the show’s return to form, and thankfully contained various acts of wanton cruelty.

try to humiliate her best friend, crush an innocent underclassman, thwart her mother’s crucial fashion show not once, not twice, but three times

(that’s from NY Mag’s weekly breakdown of the show’s finer points).

We can debate (and they do) whether any of her assorted misdeeds was effective at getting her friend back, a point I’ll take up later. But we don’t need to argue about her motivation: her best friend has rejected her and her mother is neglecting her in favor of a younger, blonder, protegé.

This is actually a hallmark of Blair’s character, and of one style of drawing a character in general: Psychological transparency. Her motivations are intelligible, and her actions are related to them in a straightforward way.

On the other hand, there’s Chuck, whose relationship to his motivation changes in this episode. A brief examination of how will shed light on how the show is written, and what it means to write (and read) a character.

Sheely, Belinkie, and I watched the most recent episode of Gossip Girl together. It was Belinkie’s first time, and he was not amused. I wish, actually, that we had recorded it. He kept annoying our other guest by pointing out the trite dialogue, formulaic plots, and lack of stakes. For someone trying desperately to be entertained by a lackluster episode, it was devastating. He won.

But then he looked on the internet and saw a veritable avalanche of high-end media outlets proudly claiming the show as a guilty pleasure. Somewhat chastened, he emailed me:

I’m not quite getting the appeal, but you can’t ALL be pretending to think the show is good. So maybe I’ll give it another shot.

Gossip Girl is too early in its second season, but it may yet prove to follow the trajectory of it’s predecessor, The O.C.: a novel and promising first season, followed by a long slow decline. Or, in The O.C.’s case, an extremely rapid decline and a long time spent sitting a the bottom.

That remains to be seen. But why would we, or McSweeney’s, or New York Magazine, situated as we are in the post-Sopranos Golden Age of Television, bother with anything even the slightest bit substandard? Upon reflection, I think we can in fact all be pretending to think the show is good. Why, you ask? Let me tell you…

Wow, so, OK, my weekly post on Gossip Girl is almost a week late. Since Belinkie and I are watching tonight’s episode together, which will probably provide fodder for any number of posts (especially considering the day’s financial meltdown), I should probably push this out, huh? For those just now catching up on this series, last week I saw a problem with Gossip Girl. To recap and summarize:

Gossip Girl’s unique claim on our attention — allowing us vicariously to enjoy stratospheric displays of wealth (leaving aside the scantily clad nubile young things, which are on offer elsewhere) — is inherently at odds with its status as a teen soap opera.

The attraction of great wealth is that, at least in theory, it elevates one above the striving, disappointments, and compromises which the non-wealthy must endure. This is why, as F. Scott Fitzgerald points out, wealth changes the wealthy, replacing one kind of toughness, born of character-building deprivation, with another, a contempt for those who have not enjoyed similar advantages.

But this substitute toughness is at odds with the dramatic necessities of soap opera, which demands that everyone act like an adolescent. (With all the musical beds, copious drinking, and absent parents, we can be forgiven for forgetting that the characters are, in fact, nominally adolescents.) You can’t be hardened by life in the upper crust and still pout and sigh like a petulant child when your boyfriend doesn’t call you.

This is all complicated by our relationship to television, over which we exert a kind of sadomasochistic intimate mastery. The point of the wealth represented on Gossip Girl is that you don’t have it. But the point of television is that you do have it, and with TiVo you have it whenever you want it.

This week, I am taking up that other influence, besides riches beyond the dreams of avarice, on our poor little rich girls and boys: their parents. Needless to say, the outlook is bleak. Spoilers after the jump.

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves.

—”The Rich Boy”, F. Scott Fitzgerald (1926)

This passage is probably the source of the supposed exchange between Fitzgerald and Hemingway. (F. Scott: “The rich are not like you and me.” Ernest: “Yes. They have more money.”)

I wonder what the author of Gatsby would think of Gossip Girl, whose second season bowed last night on the chronically under-performing CW network. I guess money and scantily clad young things don’t pull viewers like it used to, though we would be mistaken to take this as encouraging evidence about the taste of the American public.

Or maybe Hemingway’s (alas, apocryphal) ironic comment is the more revealing here. By seeming to misunderstand Fitzgerald’s point, he suggests that he doesn’t have one.

I think that Gossip Girl is, at bottom not a show about money at all (though money has a great deal to do with its deeper significance). Mild spoilers and spicy overthinking after the jump. And yes, I am going to make this a weekly series.

If you’ve been watching TV at all lately, you’ve probably come across this commercial for the shamelessly sleazy CW show Gossip Girl.

I’ve not watched the show before, and I don’t think I care to.  But what is UP with that music?  The man you’re hearing is Plastic Bertrand, and the song is 1977’s Ca Plane Pour Moi.  It’s way better when it isn’t chopped up into three second clips.