Entertainment Weekly Reviews Gossip Girl
Steve Marsi at .Ken Tucker is a respected television critic for Entertainment Weekly.
Here's how he reviewed Gossip Girl:
The show is structured around the ''Gossip Girl'' blog, whose author is a voice-over (Kristen Bell, crossing her Veronica Mars character with Sarah Jessica Parker in Sex and the City — she's breezy and WASPish).
The initial hookups and breakups mostly involve Blake Lively's Serena van der Woodsen, who in the premiere is returning to the catfight fray after a boarding-school stay. Among the many eruptions of jealousy and status-seeking, Serena and Blair (Leighton Meester) both covet Nate (Chace Crawford).
I'll play geezer worrywart and wonder whether young viewers really need a show in which teens swill martinis, talk breezily of recreational Viagra, and use ''tap that ass'' as a term of fond feeling. And Schwartz and Savage might have fared better had they just built their own show from the ground up:
The Gossip books have been around since 2002 — a generation in the young-adult publishing trade. The GG brand may have peaked. Whatever. The cast is as good as the pilot script, and I may not be its target demo, but I admire its fleet pace and sly craft.
Steve Marsi is the Managing Editor of TV Fanatic. Follow him on Google+ or email him here.