Gossip Girl: B

"You're nobody until you're talked about."

One wonders whether or not Josh Schwartz, that whiz-kid maestro behind the best years of The O.C., realized the inherent irony involved when he - a witty television scribe famous for his one-man magic trick: turning "teenage life" into teenage life - took on the job of adapting a young adult book series concerned with the very last thing those Cally kids would have been: gossip, and lots of it. Yet the end result doesn't have a split personality - there are no Seth Cohens struggling to burst the fabric of cloistered, gritty Upper East Side gossip-queens and rich-kid cricles; if anything Schwartz and co-creator Stephanie Savage (another O.C. alum) give Gossip Girl a breezy irreverence otherwise lacking in the ubiquitous viral ad campaigns - replete with air-brushed faces and an implicit malevolence wrapped around the show's tag-line (with which I started this review). But more wisely, they also give the series premiere (and, a viewer hopes, the subsequent episodes) a fast-pace - all the better with which to deliver their throwaway lines and surprisingly good performances.

The titular "Gossip Girl" (Kristen Bell) serves as both narrator of the show and magnate for all of its many secrets, strained tensions, and storylines past, future, and present. Who cares? More importantly, and all the more courageously given the sheer burden of back-story needing to be expounded on, Ms. Ex-Veronica Mars gives our guide to the cliques and pariahs of Manhattan a delightful snarl; she delivers her observations and updates ("Melanie91 reports that...") with pin-point blase glee - all the better to keep a show not exactly founded on new ideas pumping with hot blood, and viewer interest (and joy, since Bell has managed to find such enjoyable work so quickly after her untimely demise on Mars).

This isn't to suggest that viewer interest won't be kept by the trials of one miss Serena van der Woodsen (Blake Lively) when she returns from a year of mysterious exile (a grand entrance our Girl relishes, obviously). Sure her "struggles" are watchable, and more than once fun (the pilot script, by Schwartz & Savage, has a bite of entitled wit), but far more interesting to me are what will happen to those rocked by the waves she creates by her re-entry: Blair Waldorf (Leighton Meester), her "BFF", and Co. Already in this first hour there is substantial material, and juice-packed at that: Blair's desparate, wire-thin veneer of vanity and security; the frog-to-princes(or princess) tales of siblings Dan and Jenny Humphrey (Penn Badgley and Taylor Momsen); the back story on Serena's departure.

With such a wad of story though there comes a certain, heavy, commitment in viewing. And though the thought of pursuing such "frivolity" for an entire season can occasionally weigh on a person's soul (you can only take so much of Chuck Bass, trust me) the viewing experience is counter-balanced nicely with cast's alert, lively work and the promise of more carb-lite nothing (and by "nothing" I do mean solid quality t.v.) on Wednesday nights. If this all sounds alittle iffy - the thought of watching more rich kids struggle through their "issues" while listening to but more smarm, sass, and Justin Timberlake-via-soundtrack - while paradoxically being slightly addictive - I'd come back just to here more of Blake Lively's repartee (a clear-eyed alcoholic problem-child on the networks is, after all, so hard to find these days) - I'm sure that our anonymous, eponymous mistress of the blogosphere wouldn't have it any other way..and come around in a few more episodes, and I just might have to agree.