The requisite Gossip Girl Post

From The OC to Gossip Girl, I love a good Josh Schwartz drama.  Everyone either is each other's long-lost step blood brother or is dating one.  The parents of the 'main couple' always had former romantic entanglements.  And best of all, there's always a brunette best friend who is rather sassy.  That detail is key.

And I think that the savvy viewer can strike a few analogies.  Not that I’ve been thinking hard about this or anything:

The OC	Gossip Girl
bitchy brunette best friend
Sought-after blonde with zero personality
Nerd who always ‘gets  some’ and is clearly some unrequited fantasy universe for Josh Schwartz
Dad from the ‘wrong side of the tracks’ with unfortunate first name (Sandy and Rufus, respectively)
Blonde mother who I could swear is the same actress but actually isn’t

There are some notable differences, though.  For one thing, we all know that if the cast of the OC met the cast of Gossip Girl, Gossip Girl would turn their nose up at the Newport Beach crowd (new money, y’know?)

Also unlike the OC, no one on Gossip Girl is really funny or likable.  Unlike his OC equivalent Seth, Dan Humphrey is way too square to coin the term 'Chrismakah.’ And remember when the cast of the OC would watch The Valley, which was a hilarious, melodramatic satire of the OC itself?

Gossip Girl (especially its creepy narrator) utterly lacks this sense of humor.  In fact, the closest resemblance to a joke I could find on last week’s Gossip Girl was this comment by Blair: “Chuck’s body odor could have given a contact high to half of Manhattan!” Ummm…zing?

Gossip Girl’s attempt at class warfare is also kind of amusing.  We all know that the OC’s Ryan is from “Chino,” but to equate that with the Humphreys running an art gallery and living in a spacious loft in Brooklyn?  I don’t think so.  Any New Yorker knows that the Humphreys wouldn’t be caught dead east of Prospect Heights. 

So, while I love Gossip Girl, I will always be a die-hard fan of the angsty-but-edgy OC.  Maybe it’s the Chrismakkah.  Maybe it’s the leitmotif “You know how Kiki gets!” (This was in reference to Kirsten, aka Blonde Mother #1). 

Or maybe it was just that, at the end of the day, Gossip Girl is going to have to do a lot to recover from this obvious and poorly written expository paragraph.  This is what Jenny Humphrey said when her friend asked her if she was ready to return to her exclusive Upper East Side school:

“Please!  I faced down Eleanor Waldorf, hijacked a a society gala, had my entire collection torched by a crazy model and was basically homeless..I think I can handle high school!”

Don’t be afraid, dear reader. That’s just what happens in the world of Josh Schwartz.