What magazine am I? I’LL NEVER TELL.
I love two things in this world (at least for the purpose of this bombastic opening line): snooty New Yorker condescension and Gossip Girl. But what I love even more is when the two combine to create a sudden, unexpected “Oh SNAP!” moment. Conveniently, that’s just what happened when I read the vaunted magazine’s November review of the show. The writer, Nancy Franklin, seems somewhat unimpressed with the series (she clearly hasn’t seen the light), and as the column reaches its final paragraph, it seems inevitable that we’ll receive some sort of withering critique about television’s shallow depiction of teen culture. Instead she ends with this:
“Gossip Girl” has indeed become a hit, though not a megahit. It’s now possible—and necessary—for Nielsen to count viewings of shows that people have recorded on their DVRs and watched within seven days, and “Gossip Girl” ’s ratings jump from not so hot to respectable when those figures are taken into account. It’s also the top TV show on iTunes at the moment. It was on the basis of these two elements of our brave new multiplatform world that the CW decided recently to order a full season of “Gossip Girl.” Advertisers’ being drawn to a show that sells well on iTunes wasn’t even a concept until a couple of years ago. All the new ways of delivering shows to viewers are starting to pan out for the studios and the networks that own them. That they continue to balk at sharing a larger fraction of their stupendous wealth with writers—the people who make that wealth possible—is as mystifying as it is sensationally wrong.
OH SNAP! If Nancy Franklin were mediating, this strike would be OVER!