'Gossip Girl' Gets Set for TV, Igniting Debate on Upper East Side
A new television show is about to give New York City private schools the kind of attention students, parents, and administrators say they despise.
Among the scenes in the pilot episode of "Gossip Girl," a series about life at single-sex Upper East Side private schools: A girl in a tiny dress twirls atop a bar, creating a Marilyn Monroe effect that delights a boy seated below her; the same girl, one year later, swirls martinis at a hotel lounge on a school night, solo and sorry for herself; two boys smoke marijuana in Central Park, debating the burdensome expectations their affluence brings; one of those boys sexually assaults first one girl, then another, both made vulnerable by a few too many glasses of Champagne. Sexy variations on schoolgirl (and boy) uniforms are rampant, but in none of the scenes do the students actually spend time in class.
Based on a book series that has topped best-seller lists several times, selling 4.5 million copies, the television premiere of "Gossip Girl" is reigniting a debate over how accurately the series depicts life on the Upper East Side.
"There are parallels," a 2007 graduate of the Spence School, Mina Beveney, said after watching the pilot, which will air September 19 on the CW network.
Students said several schools have imposed bans on speaking to the press after unflattering depictions of the schools. Nightingale-Bamford is the alma mater of the "Gossip Girl" books' original author, Cecily von Ziegesar.
Several young Upper East Siders said that having loved the books, they are anxiously awaiting CW's "Gossip Girl."
The show opens with the return of the blonde hero, Serena van der Woodsen, to Manhattan from boarding school — an arrival that a narrator says promises to upend the world at the fictional Constance Billard (for girls) and St. Jude's (for boys) schools. The narrator, who it turns out is the anonymous Gossip Girl, author of a blog on her peers' social lives, then signs off with a bewitching "XOXO."
The popular e-mail signoff is never said out loud in real life, according to students interviewed by The New York Sun. "You'd sound like a dumb person," Miss Beveney said.
Later the television girls are shown sitting on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in their Constance Billard uniforms, plaid skirts just above their knees.
On the steps, the girls hold invitations for a party called "Kiss On The Lips."
At the party, complimentary champagne flowed as teenagers danced, some text-messaging to the beat.
Neither of the shows' creators, Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage — who also produced the popular Fox drama "The O.C." about young people in Orange County, California — are from New York City, Ms. Savage said.
So they researched. Ms. Savage said she spent two weeks in the city, where she interviewed between six and 10 girls. The books' editor, Cynthia Eagen, said that their author, Ms. von Ziegesar, also aims for realism, drawing on her own experience and sometimes eavesdropping on teenagers around the city.
A 2007 Spence graduate, Kathryn Arffa, who has read the books, said the series blots out a large part of her life: academics. She said she is dreading the television show. "People associate it with my life, and my life is nothing like that," she said. "I live nothing like Serena van der Woodsen."
Ms. Savage said she heard similar criticisms of the Gossip Girl books from the girls she interviewed. She said future episodes will feature time in actual classrooms, including an episode about a phenomenon called "Ivy Week," where Ivy League admissions officers will visit a school, to students' terror.
Miss Beveney, who grew up in Queens and commuted to Spence, said the light focus on academics was misleading. "I don't understand how they're glamorously not doing five hours of homework a night," she said.
Miss Beveney said she does not plan to watch the show regularly. "It will rot your brain," she said. But she said she did find the pilot entertaining.
"I'd watch it if there was nothing else on," she said.
