OMG! Gossip Girl returns juicier than ever
After a three-month hiatus due to the writers’ strike, Josh Schwartz’s CW teen drama Gossip Girl, a show peopled by preternaturally attractive new stars dressed in the latest clothes, steeped in simmering emotions and smothered by a thick coat of money, is back and bitchier than ever.
In an advertising ploy to draw in more viewers, Gossip Girl’s creators have ushered in a sex-soaked promo campaign. The ads (print and video), in a nod to the show’s text-happy teen and young-adult viewers, use emoticons (:-O), the OMG (Oh My God!) acronym. While the OMG ads are being showcased around a good majority of the country, in larger and more liberally populated areas like New York City and Los Angeles, a racier version is being showed – OMFG.
CW marketing chief Rick Haskins says the campaign achieved its goal by getting attention, even if some magazines, local stations and cable systems refused to run some of the ads. But “it was less about the shock value and more about speaking in the language our target audience (female teenagers) understands.”
The CW has also stopped streaming Gossip Girl online, in hopes to draw viewers to watch on television instead of the Internet. To encourage viewers, the show’s writers are incorporating much more juicy and controversial plot lines in the remaining five episodes of the first season. In the first thirteen episodes, Schwartz has already included a pregnancy scare, a marriage proposal, an attempted rape, a lost virginity, a near-deadly accident, a divorce, a suicide attempt, multiple thefts, blackmail, a drug addiction, a threesome, at least two counts of breaking and entering and an eating disorder. Some viewers are wondering how it can even be possible to create more twisted plot lines, but have no fear. The first three of the last five episodes, “The Blair Bitch Project,” “Desperately Seeking Serena” and “All About My Brother” make the previous thirteen episodes pale in comparison, and the last two episodes, “Woman on the Verge” and “Much ‘I Do’ About Nothing” are sure to top it all off, eliciting many “OMG” or even “OMFG” responses.
One Buena Vista University student in particular feels that The CW is hurting itself by pulling the Gossip Girl stream from it’s website.
“The CW’s decision to pull Gossip GIrl’s streaming is ridiculous. It’s only eliminating ad revenue that could have been brought in by streaming the episodes online,” sophomore Jason Jacobs, TV fanatic extrodinaire, said. “Fans are just going to start illegally downloading the show. The CW loves this show so it’s going to continue to promote it. I don’t think the show should be cancelled, but there’s no sense in lying to itself anymore. This is clearly a desperate ploy.”
Something had to be done though. The first thirteen episodes of Gossip Girl averaged only 2.5 million viewers per episode, but sales on iTunes have been outrageous, regularly spiking to the top-selling slot. Among network shows, Gossip Girl ranks No. 9 among female teens. Among total teens though, it reaches No. 30, tied with Dancing with the Stars. Despite lower than expected ratings, the show’s impact on the broader culture, from music to fashion, is fierce, drawing comparisons to the marks that Sex and the City and The OC (also created by Schwartz) made. Because it’s set and filmed in New York City, the show is introducing a new and much younger generation to the city Sex and the City glamorized a decade ago. And it’s key to the struggling CW network’s future.
Schwartz’s dream is to get 10 million people to watch the show, but such numbers are clearly not in the cards. Until, or if, Gossip Girl is able to draw in that many viewers, Schwartz just wants viewers of the show to be passionate about it.
After Gossip GIrl’s season finale on May 19 at 7 p.m. EST, the show will return with an extended 24-episode second season to make up for the episodes lost during the writers’ strike.
-Lindsay
