Gossip Girl The Complete First Season Review

Genre: Teen Drama
Price: $38.99 on Amazon
Run Time: 1024 minutes
Publisher: Warner Home Video
Starring: Blake Lively, Leighton Meester, Penn Badgley, Chace Crawford, Taylor Momsen, Ed Westwick, Kelly Rutherford, Matthew Settle
Special Features: Unaired Scenes, The Beginning: XOXO, Gossip Girl Couture, A Gossip Girl Wedding, LOL Gag Reel, The Pierces Music Videos, Downloadable Audiobook of the Original Best Sellling Novel

This past season Gossip Girl aired on the CW. Before it began it’s run on television it received quite a bit of press. This didn’t last very long though since most critics didn’t really like the show. I watched the first episode on CW and that was it. I thought the show was completely average and it was one of the shows I had to cut since there were many other shows I liked much better. When I received the first season in the mail though I found a good opportunity to get caught up for the upcoming season. Overall after watching the whole season the show grew a little on me but I still think it is just an average teen drama.

Based on the best selling novels Gossip Girl follows the sons and daughters of New York’s rich and famous. First there is Serena who is returning to New York after a semester at boarding school. She has to deal with her wild past while dealing with trouble at home and falling in love. Dan (one of the only non rich kids at school) has a hard time getting along his his rich peers until he falls in love with Serena and is brought into the rich and glamorous lifestyle. Dan’s sister Jenny also quickly finds her way into the wealthy lifestyle as she tries to rise through the social ranks at school. Meanwhile Nate and Blair have the perfect relationship (or is it?). Finally Chuck likes to party with as many different ladies as possible. All their escapades are captured and posted on the web by the local rumormonger called the Gossip Girl.

Before getting further into the review I have to say that Gossip Girl is easily one of the most over-hyped average shows on television today (mostly due to the CW claiming that it is a hit even though the ratings say a much different story). Gossip Girl is not a terrible show but I wouldn’t consider it to be any better than average. Gossip Girl is essentially your average teen drama set in New York about a bunch of kids who have wealthy parents. The show actually takes a lot of storyline ideas from other teen dramas. I am a little bit of a sucker for teen dramas but I can tell you that there have been many better teen dramas than Gossip Girl.

One thing I do give the show credit for is that throughout the season it does a decent shot of getting people to actually feel sorry for the characters. It is pretty hard to get people to care about kids that probably spend more in one day shopping than I would make in probably at least a year. I don’t know what people’s fascination with rich people is but if you are one of these people you should like Gossip Girl quite a bit.

As far as the episodes are concerned I thought the show started off a little slow but picked up a little as the season finale approached. As far as what you can expect out of episodes you pretty much get a bunch of character development. If you aren’t into character development you won’t like Gossip Girl since with most dramas like this the characters drive the story and if you don’t care about character development you will probably be pretty bored.

Overall I was a little surprised by the acting. The key word there is a LITTLE. The acting is far from superb but I thought the acting was a little above average for a teen drama. Since most teen dramas feature younger actors they obviously don’t have as much experience and in return you usually don’t get as good of acting as you would with an older and more experienced cast. The cast of Gossip Girl hold their own though and don’t really hold the show back.

Fans of the show are probably interested in the special features. Overall I didn’t think they were bad. Like most DVD sets though I would only recommend them to people that are pretty big fans of the show. The one special feature that I actually found to be pretty interesting was The Beginning XOXO. It is a pretty average making of featurette but it did have some interesting aspects on how the show was adapted from the book series. If you are interested in either the book series or the show this should be very interesting to you. The rest of the special features were very average. Gossip Girl Couture deals with the outfits, hair and makeup used on the show. A Gossip Girl Wedding deals with all the work that went into shooting the season finale (I will stop right there so I don’t give away any spoilers). The gag real, deleted scenes and music videos are exactly what you get out of every dvd set that features these exact same special features. One thing that might interest people that are interested in the book series is the audiobook of the first Gossip Girl book so you can start reading the books that inspired the show.

I have been pretty harsh on Gossip Girl in this review but it is pretty hard to compliment something that is very average and not particularly original. This doesn’t mean that the show isn’t good it just doesn’t really stand out in my opinion. If you have already watched the show and liked it (I know the show has a lot of fans) I would recommend that you pick up this DVD set if you want to re-watch the episodes. Otherwise if you like teen dramas I would also recommend that you look into picking up Gossip Girl.

My Rating: