Gold:
“Gossip Girl”
Wednesdays 8 p.m.
In “Gossip Girl” a fabulous new fangled group of elite teenagers live their lives in the posh Upper East Side of New York City where they live, go to school, and sleep – sometimes with each other.
Adapted from Cecilia Von Ziesgar’s #1 New York Times Bestselling book series of the same name, which remains privately familiar to most of today’s female youth, it plays close to the craft of its source material, altering very little yet adding an ace duet of players.
Portraying the viperous Blair Waldorf is actress Leighton Meester and her best friend/worst enemy Serena van der Woodsen, played by actress Blake Lively. Together they spearhead their high society clique. It was Aristotle who said that the perfect tragedy should take place in the royal court, where connected people of grand status can be dragged through the mud with the greatest effect.
Lately, upper-class high school melodrama seems to have taken the place of the old “gridirons” of the stage, as its turbulence remarks well the hyperbole of Romantics, where status means everything, love knows no bounds, and revenge takes a front seat in the spectacle of the show.
One can almost hear Blair’s furor as she finds out Serena slept with Nate Archibald (Chace Crawford), her current boyfriend, which occurred before she stole him from Serena when Serena went off to boarding school without letting anybody know – what a lion! You can make out in Blair’s eyes a rage akin to Queen Tamora of Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus,” who remarks proudly that she will “find a day to massacre them all, and raze their factions to the ground.”
Blair does just that, spreading rumors about Serena’s time spent in a drug clinic not only to her friends and family, but also to an entire Ivy League admissions committee. If you liked Mean Girls or the O.C., you will adore this blend of the two, the mod-chic accomplishment of the fall season.
Garbage:
“Pushing Daisies”
Wednesdays 8 p.m.
This is a crude show and furthermore, a waste of time. Watching this is similar to reading a bare outline for a Cambrian Age cave painting that somebody folded over itself and kept folding until he held a teleplay in front of him. In its entirety it is without color or spirit, or a pleasing outfit. Simply put, it is crude.
Its protagonist, Ned, has the ability to bring the dead back to life through only his touch. If he touches twice, the living being dies once more. He uses this ability to temporarily wake the deceased and ask them about the circumstances surrounding their deaths. For solving their murders he receives a reward, which he divides fairly between himself and an investigator.
But there is a trade-off for Ned’s power; if he does not touch, and thus kill, the living again within one minute of revival, another person close by will die to make up for “the imbalance of the universe.”
The laws of the “Pushing Daisies” world are never explained beyond this small note, and they do not especially ask to be. Most of the facts and moments of the show are arbitrary. Life histories of insignificant characters, such as the sweetheart’s grandparents, are doled out at an instant, as if viewers could care less for the novelty.
There lies no entree in “Daisies”, no fat to chew. The whole thing is a garnish. The offbeat humor simply mimics the suburban kink of “Desperate Housewives,” and only imitates quirk, adding to a silly mixture of the macabre and a Kafkaesque superpower.
Other shows in the past have made the same mash, but “Pushing Daisies” is the best example of calamity, an ugly stroke of an otherwise healthy television station.
