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<b>GOSSIP GIRL</b> - Episode Information and Ratings (Numbers are from Nielsen Media Research)

Live+7 Total Viewers = Live Viewers + DVR playback up to 7 days later (Live + 7)

Live+SD Total Viewers = Live Viewers + Same Day DVR playback (Live + Same Day)

Live Total Viewers = Live Viewers

18-49 = Live + SD Numbers

Season 4

Timeslot: Monday at 9pm

Episode 4.1: "Belles De Jour"

Air Date: September 13, 2010

Written By: Joshua Safran & Stephanie Savage

Directed By: Mark Piznarski

Live+7 Total Viewers: 2.38 million

Live+SD Total Viewers: 1.83 million

18-49: 1.0/2

18-49 Live+7: 1.3

Episode 4.2: "Double Identity"

Air Date: September 20, 2010

Written By: Sara Goodman & Joshua Safran

Directed By: Mark Piznarski

Live+7 Total Viewers: 2.38 million

Live+SD Total Viewers: 1.84 million

18-49: 1.0/3

18-49 Live+7: 1.4

Episode 4.3: "The Undergraduates"

Air Date: September 27, 2010

Written By: Amanda Lasher

Directed By: Norman Buckley

Live+7 Total Viewers: 2.41 million

Live+SD Total Viewers: 1.78 million

18-49: 1.0/2

18-49 Live+7: 1.4

Episode 4.4: "A Touch of Eva"

Air Date: October 4, 2010

Written By: Leila Gerstein

Directed By: Andrew McCarthy

Live+7 Total Viewers: 2.65 million

Live+SD Total Viewers: 2.0 million

18-49: 1.1/3

18-49 Live+7: 1.5

Episode 4.5: "Goodbye, Columbia"

Air Date: October 11, 2010

Written By: Robert Hull

Directed By: Jeremiah Chechik

Live+7 Total Viewers: 2.36 million

Live+SD Total Viewers: 1.78 million

18-49: 0.9/2

18-49 Live+7: 1.3

Episode 4.6: "Easy J"

Air Date: October 25, 2010

Written By: Jake Coburn

Directed By: Lee Shallat Chemel

Live+7 Total Viewers: 2.46 million

Live+SD Total Viewers: 1.88 million

18-49: 1.0/2

18-49 Live+7: 1.3

Episode 4.7: "War at the Roses"

Air Date: November 1, 2010

Written By: Jessica Queller

Directed By: Joe Lazarov

Live+7 Total Viewers: 2.39 million

Live+SD Total Viewers: 1.82 million

18-49: 1.0/2

18-49 Live+7: 1.3

Episode 4.8: "Juliet Doesn’t Live Here Anymore"

Air Date: November 8, 2010

Written By: Jeanne Leitenberg

Directed By: Patrick Norris

Live+7 Total Viewers: 2.38 million

Live+SD Total Viewers: 1.78 million

18-49: 0.9/2

18-49 Live+7: 1.3

Episode 4.9: "The Witches of Bushwick"

Air Date: November 15, 2010

Written By: Sara Goodman

Directed By: Ron Fortunato

Live+7 Total Viewers: 2.22 million

Live+SD Total Viewers: 1.69 million

18-49: 0.9/2

18-49 Live+7: 1.3

Episode 4.10: "Gaslit"

Air Date: November 29, 2010

Written By: Robert Hull & Joshua Safran

Directed By: Tate Donovan

Live+7 Total Viewers: 2.52 million

Live+SD Total Viewers: 1.96 million

18-49: 1.0/3

18-49 Live+7: 1.3

Episode 4.11: "The Townie"

Air Date: December 6, 2010

Written By: Amanda Lasher & Stephanie Savage

Directed By: Joe Lazarov

Live+7 Total Viewers: 2.65 million

Live+SD Total Viewers: 2.05 million

18-49: 1.0/3

18-49 Live+7: 1.4

Episode 4.12: "The Kids Are Not All Right"

Air Date: January 24, 2011

Written By: K.J. Steinberg

Directed By: Allan Kroeker

Live+7 Total Viewers: 2.15 million

Live+SD Total Viewers: 1.58 million

18-49: 0.9/2

18-49 Live+7: 1.2

Episode 4.13: "Damien Darko"

Air Date: January 31, 2011

Written By: Leila Gerstein

Directed By: Jeremiah Chechik

Live+7 Total Viewers: 2.14 million

Live+SD Total Viewers: 1.50 million

18-49: 0.8/2

18-49 Live+7: 1.1

Episode 4.14: "Panic Roommate"

Air Date: February 7, 2011

Written By: Jake Coburn

Directed By: Andrew McCarthy

Live+7 Total Viewers: 2.10 million

Live+SD Total Viewers: 1.62 million

18-49: 0.8/2

18-49 Live+7: 1.2

Episode 4.15: "It-Girl Happened One Night"

Air Date: February 14, 2011

Written By: Alexandra McNally

Directed By: Bart Wenrich

Live+7 Total Viewers: 1.92 million

Live+SD Total Viewers: 1.32 million

18-49: 0.7/2

18-49 Live+7: 1.1

Episode 4.16: "While You Weren't Sleeping"

Air Date: February 21, 2011

Written By: Sara Goodman

Directed By: Norman Buckley

Live+7 Total Viewers: 2.05 million

Live+SD Total Viewers: 1.57 million

18-49: 0.8/2

18-49 Live+7: 1.1

Episode 4.17: "Empire of the Son"

Air Date: February 28, 2011

Written By: Robert Hull

Directed By: David Warren

Live+7 Total Viewers: 1.91 million

Live+SD Total Viewers: 1.39 million

18-49: 0.7/2

18-49 Live+7: 1.0

Episode 4.18: "The Kids Stay in the Picture"

Air Date: April 18, 2011

Written By: Jessica Queller

Directed By: J. Miller Tobin

Live+7 Total Viewers: 2.04 million

Live+SD Total Viewers: 1.43 million

18-49: 0.7/2

18-49 Live+7: 1.1

Episode 4.19: "Pretty In Pink"

Air Date: April 25, 2011

Written By: Amanda Lasher

Directed By: Liz Friedlander

Live+7 Total Viewers: 2.18 million

Live+SD Total Viewers: 1.55 million

18-49: 0.8/2

18-49 Live+7: 1.2

Episode 4.20: "The Princesses and the Frog"

Air Date: May 2, 2011

Written By: Leila Gerstein

Directed By: Andrew McCarthy

Live+7 Total Viewers: 1.90 million

Live+SD Total Viewers: 1.27 million

18-49: 0.7/2

18-49 Live+7: 1.1

Episode 4.21: "Shattered Bass"

Air Date: May 9, 2011

Written By: Sara Goodman

Directed By: Allison Liddi-Brown

Live+7 Total Viewers: 1.77 million

Live+SD Total Viewers: 1.20 million

18-49: 0.6/2

18-49 Live+7: 1.0

Episode 4.22: "The Wrong Goodbye"

Air Date: May 16, 2011

Written By: Joshua Safran

Directed By: Patrick Norris

Live+7 Total Viewers: 1.89 million

Live+SD Total Viewers: 1.36 million

18-49: 0.7/2

18-49 Live+7: 1.0

<a href="http://boards.soapoperanetwork.com/index.php?showtopic=27648" target="_blank">Season 1, 2, 3 - Episode information and ratings</a>

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September 12, 2007

Omigosh! ‘OC’ With Warmer Duds?

By MELENA RYZIK

The sex starts about five minutes into the premiere of “Gossip Girl,” a new series based on the best-selling young-adult books by Cecily von Ziegesar. Within 20 minutes the characters, privileged Upper East Side private schoolers, are downing martinis at the Palace Hotel. There is some pot smoking in Central Park, and more sex, at the Campbell Apartment bar, and more pot smoking, en route to Queens. Forget the No. 7 train: this gang travels to the outer boroughs via limo, with bottles of Champagne in hand.

For the teenagers of New York, 10021, the city is a playground of temptation. Created by Josh Schwartz, the 31-year-old wunderkind behind “The OC,” and his business partner Stephanie Savage, “Gossip Girl,” which is scheduled to make its debut next Wednesday on the CW network, has already gained buzz as the East Coast “OC.” It features an ensemble cast of fresh-faced actors (including Blake Lively as a nicer Marissa Cooper and Penn Badgley as a Seth Cohen type); soapy plot lines (Will Nate dump Blair for Serena? Will Rufus reconnect with Lilly?); a pop- culture soundtrack (Amy Winehouse, Rihanna and Peter Bjorn and John) and teenage tech savvy (they text-message constantly).

Narrated by the Gossip Girl, an unseen blogger — voiced by Kristen Bell, of “Veronica Mars”— who keeps tabs on this scene like an adolescent Gawker, the show has a slight twist on previous nighttime soaps: younger stars, greater wealth and more location shots. The entire series is filmed in New York. “There’s no New York City on TV, or there wasn’t when we started making the pilot, except what you could see in the background behind the dead bodies on cop shows,” Ms. Savage said. “The ‘Sex and the City’ fun, romantic world” was no longer visible. And, she added:

“We’ve never seen the city from the point of view of teenagers. It was very intriguing to see these young people — so sophisticated, so driven, so well traveled — feeling pressured to succeed more than their parents. It felt like a world with high stakes for young people.”

It is also a high-stakes show for CW. Along with “Reaper,” a comedy-horror hybrid, “Gossip Girl” is a centerpiece of its fall lineup. The books’ fans, a built-in audience, are already blogging about how the TV version differs.

“What’s funny about these teenagers is they grew up watching ‘Sex and the City,’ even though it wasn’t about them,” Mr. Schwartz said. “And I think they’ve probably incorporated that into how they mythologize New York. I fought really hard to shoot the show in New York because we want New York to be a character in the show.” Given their clout as hit makers, Mr. Schwartz and Ms. Savage persuaded the network to comply, despite the added costs.

“In my mind there really hasn’t been a show that has that opulence and that wealth and that setting since the days of ‘Dynasty’ and ‘Dallas,’ ” said Dawn Ostroff, the president of CW. “And of course the generation we speak to have probably never heard of those.”

Translating that high-society world into contemporary teenage culture was tricky.

“I thought it was going to be the sort of Disney version of the books, really toned down and corny,” said Ms. von Ziegesar, the creator of the book series, which has more than five million copies in print. “A while back,” she added, “there was a script circulating, and the boys were playing polo in Central Park. And I was horrified, because that doesn’t happen. It was such a stereotype.”

Mr. Schwartz’s and Ms. Savage’s involvement helped put her at ease. “They got everything right,” she said, citing the pot-smoking scene as one example. “I was thrilled.”

Neither Mr. Schwartz nor Ms. Savage was familiar with the trappings of the socialite milieu. (“I am a latchkey kid from Calgary, Alberta,” Ms. Savage said. Mr. Schwartz grew up in Rhode Island, the son of toy designers.) But they did their homework. Ms. von Ziegesar, who is from Connecticut and attended the Nightingale-Bamford School on East 92nd Street, took Ms. Savage on a tour of her old haunts.

“We started at Barneys and walked all the way up the 90s and came down to Fifth Avenue, seeing the streets flooded with the private-school kids, just walking through the rituals,” Ms. Savage said. “I had breakfast at Sarabeth’s and Sant Ambroeus coffee. I met a bunch of girls at Jackson Hole, and we had fries. Cheese fries.”

Of course urban verisimilitude only goes so far: though Ms. von Ziegesar hoped to impress on Ms. Savage that her classmates weren’t all Prada-wearing, limo-riding sophisticates, the characters in the show largely are. “It is aspirational,” Ms. von Ziegesar conceded. “Even the uniforms are nicer.”

And the show’s frank depiction of adolescent sex and drug use has raised some eyebrows among network executives and television critics.

“Everybody approached this with the understanding that this was a heightened reality,” Ms. Ostroff said. “It wasn’t teenagers as we know them throughout the country.”

Mr. Schwartz said the criticism of the hedonistic lifestyle was fair. “We do feel a certain level of responsibility to show the repercussions of their actions,” he said. The show’s moral compass is represented by a middle-class family, the Humphreys; they’re so bohemian, they live in Brooklyn. Mr. Badgley’s character, Dan Humphrey, considered something of an outsider (he wears hoodies instead of polo shirts), fulfills Adam Brody’s role in “The OC”, which is to say Mr. Schwartz’s, as the darkly comic observer.

“I am the Josh stand-in,” Mr. Badgley said, adding that it does have its perks. “I guess I know Josh will never write himself out.”

Mr. Schwartz, who is still based in Los Angeles, plans to visit monthly to check in — or, as he put it, “you know, hang out, high-five a few people and then leave.”

The rest of the staff — Ms. Savage and five other writers (two men and three women) and the postproduction team — will remain in Los Angeles. Though in the early days of “The OC” Mr. Schwartz was famous for writing many of the episodes himself, he is taking a slightly more hands-off role now, partly of necessity.

He is also behind another new show, the NBC comedy-thriller “Chuck,” about a nerdy guy who inadvertently discovers government secrets. Both “Chuck” and “Gossip Girl” have offices in the same building on the Warner Brothers lot, and Mr. Schwartz climbs the stairs between the two all day.

Though the comparisons to “The OC” are inevitable, Ms. Savage and Mr. Schwartz are careful to say only that they hope “Gossip Girl” is equally successful. “We’re starting from a place of wanting to do this because it felt different, not because it felt the same,” Ms. Savage said.

And if “Gossip Girl” becomes a runaway hit?

Mr. Schwartz, who said he was glad when “The OC” was canceled last year after four seasons, is prepared, up to a point. “The idea of doing something for more than four years is, like, scary,” he said. “I don’t know how people do a show for, like, nine years. I couldn’t stay focused for that long.”

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I do. :D He's gonna destroy this one, too. You'll se. Either he or Steph.

Here HR review:

Bad news for the CW's too-cool-for-the-room new soapy glitzfest "Gossip Girl": my daughter positively hates it. And she's 18, just moved to New York for college and was a huge fan of Fox's "The O.C.," the previous entry on boy wonder executive producer Josh Schwartz's resume. I lent her a copy of the pilot and she reported back that she and a group of her fellow freshmen classmates who viewed the opening hour thought it was "stupid and lame and not real -- and nothing like the book." This, from what has to be seen as the heart of the show's target audience.

As someone who is about to leave the 18-49 demographic and become instantly obsolete in the eyes of all that is Madison Avenue, let me just add that I agree with my kid. The show exits the starting gate feeling very much like "Dynasty" for young posers, wafer thin and shallow enough to be mistaken for a toddler wading pool. It's so consumed with its of-the-moment zeitgeist embodiment that it forgets to give its characters any depth beyond their reshaped noses.

The capper is the use of a cloying unseen "secret" blogging gossipmonger narrator (voiced by "Veronica Mars" lead Kristen Bell) who stirs the pot by telling teasing, cheeky tales out of school about the spoiled-rotten prep school types who populate "Gossip Girl." She says stuff like, "Did B think S would go down without a fight? Or can these two hotties work it out?" Oh barf.

Based on the simmering "Gossip Girl" series of novels by Cecily von Ziegesar about youthful indiscretions on Manhattan's tony Upper East Side, the pilot is dark (as in the photography, packed with stiff performances and stiffer dialogue from the teleplay by Schwartz and his exec producer partner Stephanie Savage. We might be looking here at a quick primetime flameout -- that is, if the flame ever ignites in the first place.

What's instantly missing from this show that fueled the quick-hit phenomenon of "The O.C." is any sense that these characters are real people. They can be rich and impossible to relate to as long as we believe the veracity of their words and actions. That's a problem for this group of actors, who -- ironically enough -- sport names that might be even more pretentious than those of their alter egos. Here are the actual handles of five of the "Gossip Girl" stars: Blake Lively, Leighton Meester, Penn Badgley, Chace Crawford and Taylor Momsen. Lively portrays the mega-popular party girl Serena van der Woodsen who has just returned home to her queen's throne after a year away at boarding school. She locks horns with her BFF (that's how they refer here to "best female friend") and confirmed bitch Blair Waldorf (Meester), and their tension also spills over onto Blair's BF (that's "boyfriend") Nate (Crawford) and Serena's younger brother Eric (Connor Paolo).

Then there's Jenny Humphrey (Momsen), who desperately wants in to the hipster group, and her brother Dan (Badgley), who has the major hots for Serena despite the fact she's basically the worst thing that could ever happen to him. There are others orbiting nearby too, of course, and they will soon demonstrate that being rich and connected is not only the pits but surprisingly boring. They all illustrate in "Gossip Girl" that the high life ain't all it's cracked up to be; it's actually a bitch, and then you die (albeit with nicer clothes).

"Gossip Girl" goes to great lengths to convince us that not only can't you always get what you want, you also often can't get what you need, either (with apologies to Mick Jagger). As it premieres into a highly competitive time slot opposite well-promoted newcomers "Private Practice" on ABC and NBC's "Bionic Woman" as well as CBS' freshly-recast "Criminal Minds," the gossip figures to fall on deaf ears.

GOSSIP GIRL

The CW

Alloy Entertainment in association with Warner Bros. Television and CBS Paramount Television

Credits:

Executive producers: Josh Schwartz, Stephanie Savage, Bob Levy, Leslie Morgenstein, Felicia Henderson

Co-executive producer: K.J. Steinberg

Producer: Amy Kaufman

Co-producer: Jonathan C. Brody

Associate producer: Trey Coscia

Teleplay: Josh Schwartz, Stephanie Savage

Based on the book by: Cecily von Ziegesar

Director: Mark Piznarski

Director of photography: Ron Fortunato

Production designer: Loren Weeks

Costume designer: Eric Daman

Editor: Timothy A. Good

Music: Transcenders

Sound mixer: James Sabat

Casting: David H. Rapaport, Lindsey Hayes Kroeger

Cast:

Serena van der Woodsen: Blake Lively

Blair Waldorf: Leighton Meester

Dan Humphrey: Penn Badgley

Nate Archibald: Chace Crawford

Jenny Humphrey: Taylor Momsen

Chuck Bass: Ed Westwick

Lily van der Woodsen: Kelly Rutherford

Rufus Humphrey: Matthew Settle

Eric: Connor Paolo

Howie Archibald: Sam Robards

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I just watched it and it was predictable but I admit kinda fun... I liked the look fo the show and as long as I pretended the charactrs were in college and not High School it was definetly a good guilty pleasure and probably the best teen soap since the first year of OC (which isn'tsaying much considering how bad Hidden Palms and others quickly became but)

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It wasn't the best pilot (what is???) but I loved it. :)

It was like Melrose Place meets The OC.

It's pure fun and trashy. LOL

I've always liked Penn Badgley (ever since he wason "The Mountain") and he's pretty good here too. He and Blake Lively seem to have good chemistry.

And it's nice hearing Veronica Mars' voiceovers. LOL

I can't say enough how hot Leighton (Blair) is on this show. :wub:

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