Chuck and Blair going to the movies

Emily Gould’s take on Gossip Girl is delicious for all manner of reasons (many of them GG-related), but here are two of my favourite excerpts:

Like a lot of childless unmarried adults my age I tend to think of myself on some semiconscious level as a perpetual teenager, but then when I’m confronted with actual teenagers I realize not only that I am an adult, I am also a member of a completely different generation and fitted with a completely different make and model of brain than today’s teenagers.

Hence our love of shows like The OC and Gossip Girl. I tend to see it the opposite way, though: that the characters on these shows are honorary adults, played by actors in their twenties and (school aside) living a lifestyle more akin to someone in that age group than a high school student.

Same with the Sweet Valley books: the 12-year-olds acted like 16-year-olds, the 16-year-olds like 19-year-olds, and the 18-year-olds like 25-year-olds.

Also:

It’s rare to watch a tv show’s writers basically confess that they’ve hit a wall. Imagine if, somewhere around the third season of Friends, Ross had sat Rachel down and said, “You know, we’ll never stay together, because there would really be nothing to hang the misunderstanding-based hijinx of this show on.” When Chuck told Blair that “the game” is “what we like,” he might as well have been staring into the camera and addressing the audience directly. ‘When we finally get together,’ he’s saying, ‘you’ll know that Gossip Girl’s writers have finally gotten that memo from CW headquarters that they’ve got another episode or two to wrap things up.’

But less cynically, or maybe more cynically: the audience basically never gets to watch the ever-after part of romances – it’s boring, we’re given to understand, all that moviegoing and hand-holding. Love affairs have three acts, we know from tv, and even, a little, from our own experience. There’s the thrilling beginning, fraught with obstacles and delicious suffering. And then there’s the middle, the happy normalcy phase that actually maybe doesn’t even exist and is just a slow slide into the mediocrity and boredom that signals the end. Maybe there are just two acts, then.

And it’s so true. If love is looked upon as narrative drama, the good, content bits will always disappoint. As Andy Warhol once remarked: “The most exciting thing is not doing it. If you fall in love with someone and never do it, it’s much more exciting." This, I believe, is (one of many reasons) why it’s best to look for excitement (headlines! news! drama! amusing anecdotes! - stuff that, in many ways, I live for) in places other than one’s love life: contented relationships just don’t make for very good story fodder.

— emilymagazine.com