A few weeks ago, I got a lovely email from Amanda, 15, from Ottawa, who told me about how she turned her mad love for Gossip Girl into an essay for school. The assignment was to write about something she considered a masterpiece — so naturally she chose Gossip Girl! She sent me her awesome paper (A+ from me!) and said it was cool for me to post some of it. I loved her argument, and not just because I was super excited to see Spotted: Your One and Only Unofficial Guide to Gossip Girl
“Along with the fabulous usage of the New York City backdrop, Gossip Girl is, as New York magazine called it in April 2008, the “most awesomely awesome show ever,” due to its engaging ensemble of talented young actors. The cast is beyond incredible. They all began acting for the show at around twenty years old, and had never worked together prior to the show’s debut. In addition, none of the six main characters are native New Yorkers. Ed Westwick, who plays the known-to-be villainous character of Chuck Bass, is in fact British! (I watched the entire first season not knowing this minute detail, and was dazzled by how well he masked his accent.) The majority of the cast had never acted on television before, and the youngest of the group was just fourteen years of age! This group of rookies may have instilled doubt in some critics’ minds, yet when the Pilot episode was launched, none of these possible setbacks were even remotely apparent. As a viewer, I earnestly felt that these persons were in fact raised and culturally shaped by the city and the lifestyle that they were born into. The on-screen chemistry generated between these astonishingly youthful individuals was overwhelmingly impressive. I can still recall the spine-tingling sensation that I felt when the end credits filled the screen. It struck me then that this show was more than just a drama forcefully inflated with beautiful people of unfortunate, mediocre acting. Gossip Girl truly “transcends the limitations of its genre” (Calhoun). And it is the sensational acting abilities of the cast that makes this show attain such a predominant level of teen television.
At this point, you’re probably questioning yourselves as to who these actor individuals play on the silver screen. What is it about the characters on Gossip Girl that makes the show so incomparably distinctive? The answer: their well-defined, expansively developed personalities. Each character brings this underlying sense of relatable normalcy to the screen, despite the lavish life they live, which illustrates how far from superficial Gossip Girl actually is. In every episode, the viewer can feel the raw emotions of the characters traverse the television screen, infiltrating the room with air thick enough to be cut with a blade. The relationships and interactions are so intricately intertwined, that numerous websites have designed interactive, colour coordinated flow charts to clarify any misconceptions that people may have. This shows how electrifying and quick paced the character development is. This progression in character can be analysed to the bare bones.
Take Dan Humphrey, the show’s entrance to Brooklyn, for instance. Dan is quite the judgemental outsider. He attends the same private school as the elitist in Manhattan, as his parents value strong education. He is introduced as dealing with the divorce of his parents, by channelling his feelings into a fiery passion for writing and literature. Dan is smart, sarcastic and rather witty, but is blind to the difficulties that exist in the seemingly perfect world of his classmates. His narrow opinion of his upper class peers changes as he becomes involved with society girl Serena Van der Woodsen, and realizes how complex her world really is. Dan matures enormously over the course of the show’s three seasons, and he and the Humphrey name provide as the show’s moral backbone.
and that means I get to fix typos and errors and erroneous mistakes! I can’t stand it when I’m reading a book in its 11,000th printing and there’s still a very obvious typo in it, so I’m asking you, dear readers: did you come across any problemos in Love You to Death? So far, Vee’s alerted me to a typo in Steven R. McQueen’s bday and Nicole brought up the inaccuracy in my discussion of Dark Shadows in her 
