GOSSIP GIRL: The Complete Second Season DVD

It’s funny the way television works. Shows always seem to begin their run as innocent testaments to the triumph of love. Drama is almost always centered around a central guy-girl duo, both being from opposite sides of the tracks and both finding a way to beat the odds and make it work. Dallas, Melrose Place, Beverly Hills, 90210, The OC, One Tree Hill, Dawson’s Creek, it’s all the same template. Yet, it’s hardly ever that romance that translates into big ratings. Do we really remember Dallas for the Romeo & Juliet pairing of Bobby and Pam? No, we remember it for J.R. and his scheming ways. Do we remember Melrose Place because of Allison and Billy’s goofy courtship? No, we remember it for crazy Kimberly, bitchy Amanda and scheming Michael. Viewers love the bad boys, and no matter how much studios try to shovel romance, it’s the dirt that keeps viewers interested. Happy endings are so 1940.


Case in point, Gossip Girl. Here is a show that again began as a star-crossed pairing between the pampered private school princess Serena van der Woodsen (I know, with a name like that how could you guess, right?) , played not-so-lively by Blake Lively, and east-ender with a struggling rock star for a father Dan Humphrey (Penn Badgley), but quickly found its footing in another vocation. Gossip Girl became a show about spoiled douchebags. Part of the initial allure of The OC was all the rich and oblivious mockery of the nouveau riche, but rather than mock it, Gossip Girl embraces it. Serena’s foil, Blair Waldorf (Leighton Meester) is a mollycoddled little brat, and her male equal, Chuck Bass (Ed Westwick) is even worse. Despite the Tiger Beat looks and harmless and generally well-to-do posturing of on-again-off-again Serena/Blair love interest Nate Archibald (Chace Crawford), it’s the badass buffoonery of Chuck that seems to have all the girls and pop culture in a swoon. And this guy’s bad.


Now, there have certainly been anti-heroes in soaps before, indeed with people like J.R., Michael Mancini and One Tree Hill’s Dan Scott the genre practically thrives on it. With Chuck though, the Gossip crew push the limits of vile asshattery. You know your anti-hero is bad when his rich connections get him off rape charges during the opening episode. What a way to begin! So even if Gossip Girl tried to center on the goody good with Dan and Serena, by the first episode it was already becoming a peep hole into the lives of assholes and people you generally just love to not hate, but despise. It took Melrose Place and Dallas a good 40 episodes to reach that conclusion, but here in 2007 it only took Gossip Girl one. And once Gossip Girl found its footing in vice, it ran with it. For the season two push, The CW even went as far as to promote the well-received series with the most venomous critical pans, proudly boasting the Boston Herald’s “Every Parent’s Nightmare!” dismissal. It’s rich kids doing bad things, and by posturing it as the film adults want to hate, they’ve turned it into a faux-taboo pop culture mainstay. The douchebags are here to stay.


So what’s new in season two? Well, to start we get some amusing guest roles from Michelle TratchenIcanneverspellherlastnameberg and Brittany Snow. The Upper East Siders are still as spoiled and selfish as ever, but that doesn’t’t stop them from falling in and out of love and alliance on bi-episode basis. Most of the conflicts are of the petty omg J ruined S’s party cuz she texted the addy to gossip girl variety, but the scheming and sobbing also extends to funerals, jails and ivy league colleges. The prime mover this season is just where oh where each senior will affirm their family status by choosing a posh school in post-secondary. That is, if they ever make it there. Chuck’s back on the booze, Blair’s classing it up with community service and Serena’s flirting with a walk down the aisle. There are school plays, sweet sixteen parties and bed swapping galore, and all the while Kirsten Bell is dropping XO-XOs and hearsay as the titular gossip girl. Even her reign as the vile voice of the show is in limbo when Serena plans to out the mystery blogger for the finale.


These people are shallow, their pursuits frivolous, but all the pompous, wintry New York gloss somehow translates into addicting entertainment. Perhaps it’s because all the other breakout teen TV has been set in warm, vapid bikini weather or because we’re all just so cynical now, but watching these mindless tarts trot around in button jackets and woven scarves certainly has an appeal. Maybe it’s the fun in seeing all these spoiled brats going through the motions of trying on mommy’s makeup or daddy’s credit cards as a rite of passage. Maybe it’s because, deep down, we like to see the Gordon Gecko’s of the world succeed because, hey, ain’t that capitalism and ain’t that America?


While these snots will probably never change, I still do wait with baited, misty breath for what changes come with season three in the Big Apple. The era of the wide-eyed, do good teenager is dead. The douche bags have taken over, and until this current recession becomes a blip in the past, cynicism will rule all. And it’s all happening in the high rises and low brows of Gossip Girl.

Presentation...

All 25-episodes of the second season come in high quality 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, progressively encoded, and a 5.1 Dolby Digital surround mix. I didn’t notice a ton of directional effects – it’s mostly dialogue up front and a bit of fill in the back, but the mix effectively levels the dialogue and “It” band music in harmony. The video looks really crisp and it’s quite amazing how far television has come in the last decade, since my Melrose, Dawson’s Creek and 90210 still look like utter crap. Colors are intentionally muted because you can’t really be sly and detached without hues of grey, but it still looks ice cold appealing.


The series is presented in one big alpha case with most of the DVDs located in a middle snap in holster series. There’s a cardboard slipcase overtop of it all to make it more fitting with box sets previously released for TV product. There’s also a nice little booklet that provides a listing, summary and bullets of included extras for each episode. The menus are a little tacky, with the highlight in the form of a mouse pointer like the equally tacky episode intros, but they are organized well enough to make navigating the discs pretty intuitive. My one gripe is that right off the bat it features descriptions of the episodes on the right side of the screen, making it tough to start things up without some sense of what’s going to unfold in the episode. A plus is the toggle switch between watching the episodes with or without the recap. I remember some of my classic TV shows with the recaps and when they’re nowhere on the discs it’s always a bit of a throw-off.


As for extras, here’s the gossip:

“5th Avenue Meets Gossip Girl” features an interactive map of New York with short little 2:00 video documents of each location used in the series. It features interviews with the cast, crew and building owners, and gives a nice description not only of how each is used in the show but how each location functions in real life, too. Gossip Girl fans heading to NY, take note!


“lol” which translates to “Gag reel” for those not text message inclined. It’s actually quite humorous and really shows the way all these actors are when they’re not putting up a front for the show or for the press kit. It runs a substantial length of 10:39 and features all the principals and even a bit of the jovial crew. From the looks of it, Leighton Meester flubs her shit by far the most.

There are six “Chasing Dorota” webisodes that run roughly 3:00 a piece. Basically the proletariat spin on Gossip Girl, this features the trials and tribulations of Blair’s maid. The concept is probably funnier than the execution, it nevertheless features the maids getting together and talking shop, and Dorota trying to choose between the security guard downstairs or an old Polish ex. Each episode has the requisite narration, replacing “XOXO” with “Ta Ta”. Cute, but insubstantial.


“Gossip Girl: Faces Behind the Design” talks about the posh designs on display in the show, from the clothing to the actual art pieces within the locales. Jenny’s fashion line in the series is featured, with interviews with the ghost designer on how he came up with the styles by relating with the characters from the show. More interesting is how the show worked in a street photographer into the episodes and how the real photographer had to come in after cut to get the shots the actors were faking during the roll. The show did a few other interesting things with art throughout, and it’s on display here in this well edited 17:02 supplement.


And winning the award for the longest supplement I’ve ever seen (this side of The Frightners' 4.5 hour doc) is the 2:27:50 audiobook reading of the second entry in the Gossip Girl book series, “You Know You Love Me”. The series predated the show and set the groundwork for all that was to follow, and it’s nice to have that bit of history here, read for this release by Christina Ricci. It’s kind of funny to hear the usually wry actress reading everything with such earnest enunciation, but a paycheck is a paycheck, right? There are a ton of chapter stops, although regrettably no index for all those not hardcore enough to do it all in one sitting. It can also be downloaded onto a computer via DVD-ROM for those who want to throw it on their iPod. A novel (heh) extra that’s been continued on from the Ricci reading of the first novel on season one, here’s hoping it continues.

All those extras are located on the final disc, but there are unaired scenes scattered throughout the other discs, appended to whatever episode they originate from. There are often several on a single episode, showing just how easy it can be to trim or exclude subplots to hit that forty-three minutes.


While I’d like to see more on the cast opening up about their characters, or even the writers talking about how to adapt the book material, the extras here are still well done and a cut above the usual TV on DVD treatment.

Wrapping it up…


It may have abandoned the conceit that love conquers all after the first episode, but Gossip Girl still entertains free of irony as a window into the vapidity of bourgeois life. These people are douchebags and they revel in the fact, living out their shallow lives like it’s the only thing that matters. After this bunch, I don’t know how teen TV can ever go back to earnest romances and After School Special-esque lessons. The episodes look great in 16x9 and sound equally as good in 5.1. The packaging and presentation are solid, and the extras provide a decent window into the series plus a cool Christina Ricci spoken audio book of the novel that started it all. If you like your soaps steamy and in a tub filled with San Pellegrino, Gossip Girl won’t clean you up, but it’ll at least heat things up. Looking forward to next season, XOXO, Rhett Miller.

Overall... Content: B Video: A- Audio: B+ Extras: B Final Grade: B

MELROSE PLACE: The Fifth Season, Vol. 1 DVD

Truly, madly, deeply, I’m in love with Melrose Place. I grew up watching Beverly Hills, 90210 on TBS afterschool, and had perfect attendance throughout the other teen soap runs of Dawson’s Creek, The O.C., One Tree Hill and Degrassi, but little did I know it was all child’s play. It wasn’t until I moved into the Place Melrose when it hit DVD in 2006 that I truly started to live. Somehow in my teen years I lived oblivious to the whole pop culture phenomenon, instead basking contently in le triangle d’amour of Brenda-Dylan-Kelly. I never felt a void for not including a dollop of Melrose in all those sudsy baths of television soaps. I was in high school, and I was content. Who needs a spin-off of 90210 when you could have the real thing at West Beverly?


This was more than just a spin-off, though…this was graduation. This was higher education into just how outrageous, sexy, fun and catty television could be. Of course I didn’t know that, but with the 2006 DVD debut looming, some of my friends on set began talking. Reminiscing in all the great Melrose memories – of Marcia Cross blowing up the building, Patrick Muldoon coming back from the dead or Heather Locklear watching her father get blown to smithereens. “But Donna kept her virginity all throughout high school…” I’d mumbled defeated. Whatever. I’ve got my show, and all this Melrose talk will cease come once production wraps.


Well, as it turns out, my next film project following was to be camera trainee on some crummy Nora Roberts Lifetime movie. Refuge from all these Melrose musings? No, it was the breaking point. As fate would have it, Heather Locklear was to star, and I’d spend the better part of the month taping down her marks. There was no escaping this now – I had to jump feet first into the melodrama, L.A. style. I bought the first season, and hook line and sinker I was immediately reeled in by all the mile a minute plot twists. Of course the series began more humbly than the prime time soap du jour it would become, but that’s a tale for a different review. The fifth season here, sadly truncated into only the first half for this DVD release, marks an important turning point in the series. Let’s talk about the Melrose magic, and just what happened to it when the series went from ratings juggernaut in season four to barely being renewed in season six.


If you ask series connoisseurs, of which I can proudly consider myself a part two short years later, the series Jumped the Shark at the end of the fourth season. It was always a series characterized by jaw dropping plot twists at every cliffhanger finale, but no matter how outrageous, they always seemed grounded in some sense of reality. Cross’s Kimberly was a loon, but even when she was blowing up buildings there were repercussions. By the end of the fourth season, though, the series had nearly drowned in its own soap bubbles as Kimberly kidnapped smarmy and smug doctor, Peter Burns (current beau of our favorite Locklear, Jack Wagner), and somehow managed to have him committed to an insane asylum where she was not only running under one of her deranged split-personalities, but where she also had the authority to give him a full frontal lobotomy in front of, who else, Priscilla Presley. And then, meanwhile, Muldoon’s evil fashion mogul Richard Hart closed off the episode by reaching his hand up from his grave to come back to get revenge on his killers, Sydney and Jane Andrews (Laura Leighton and Josie Bissett, respectively). It was damn fun, but so over-the-top that no future twist could ever top it without breaking the fourth wall. With all its outlandishness, Melrose Place had painted itself into a corner.


For season five, the writers vowed to return the series to its, erm, roots, but moving away from rising from the grave storylines to the more plausible sexy trash that made seasons two and three dy-no-mite. It’s for this reason that those new to the show tread cautiously here, since this is no doubt a construction zone. A time of rebuilding. Original cast members were being phased out in favor of bringing new blood to the series. Kimberly was facing a brain tumor, gaybestfriend Matt Fielding (Desperate Housewives’ Doug Savant, who’d later marry Melrose alum Leighton) was starting an adoptive family, Jane was heading back to Chicago to deal with news of a different birth mother, and Allison Parker (Courtney Thorne-Smith) and Jake Hanson (Grant Show) were looking for residence outside of L.A. Even Sydney’s days were numbered. With six original leads sent packing by the end, just as many new tenants to the famous apartment complex needed to take up residency. So the season five cast was huge – the biggest the series cast would ever be. All this change and the series was supposed to return to its roots, too? Yikes.


Somehow, it managed, though. Highlighting the new additions was Rob Estes, who had just come off a successful run on the trashy Silk Stalkings (and who would later do Spelling proud with the patriarchal lead on the new 90210) and his big-lipped, big-mouthed wife, Lisa Renna (now doing workout videos in the Jane Fonda vein). Together they played the doomed McBrides who would jump in and out of love octagons with Locklear’s Amanda, Peter Burns and the rat to end all rats, Dr. Michael Mancini (Thomas Calabro, the only guy to make it from first episode to last). Then there was David Charvet as Craig Field, the scheming little rich brat to try and usurp Amanda’s throne as queen (king?) of the advertising world. The mantra of Melrose was always “For Sex and Money”, and for at least season five the snotty weasel followed it to a T. Kelly Rutherford joined as call girl Megan Lewis, hired by Kimberly to fulfill Mancini’s sexual impulses while she battled it out with cancer. And remember, this is the series when it’s not over-the-top! Rounding out the new additions was the Southern nice girl with a white-trash past, Samantha Reilly (Brooke Langton), who aw shucks-ed her way into Billy Campbell’s (Andrew Shue) heart.


Basically, one of the many pleasures of Melrose Place is that eventually every tenant in the building would sleep with the other, sort of solidifying that Bulworth phrase that if we all just fucked each other then dichotomies of race, religion and difference would fall by the wayside. Of course, in prime time, nobody ever has kids though. It’s always abortions and adoptions and miscarriages before those little tykes force the show to grow up and the ratings to erode. So it was with all this new cast that we could finally set aside our old Melrose hang-ups about Billy and Allison and Amanda and Jake and finally just let everyone have it every which way on bed, desk or the totally awesome common area pool. My brother and I clocked it in one episode of this season, and there were no less than eight separate sex scenes from different cast members in a single episode. Try to find a porn with that much.


Of course there was more to the show than just sex. There was money. Dr. Mancini was always thinking of ways to get even more of it, and Amanda was memorably tearing down anyone who stood in her way from rising to the top of her ad company. Jake was looking to break from his blue collar roots by running the local hangout, Shooters, and even Matt, the man who in season one turned down many a promotion for social work with inner-city kids, was on his way to himself becoming a rich doctor. To get to the money often took scheming, which again made for great TV, or even sex, which made for even better TV.


Melrose Place was head of the pack because no matter what, it was never ashamed of being saucy, shallow or downright slutty. It embraced it. When most shows then, and even most today, were always copping out with happy endings and canonical ideas of romance and honor, Melrose Place was gleefully tearing conventions down with bitchy Amanda as its spokeswoman. Taylor is going to force Mancini to impregnate her not because of goals of maternity or of bringing a life into this world, but to make her ex-husband crazy jealous. That’s it, and that’s what Melrose is all about. Check your pretension at the door and prepare for the wildest soap opera residency you can imagine. I did, and kneeling down at Locklear’s feet to mark her camera steps felt not only natural, but earned. For in the nineties, her Amanda Woodward was Queen Bitch of prime time, and if everyone else could grovel at her feet, then I sure as hell could too.

presentation...

The first nineteen episodes of season five are presented in their correct 1.33:1 full frame aspect ratio. Like all other shows from the early nineties, these episodes have been preserved on horribly interlaced video, hampering any extra sharpness the DVD format provides. The episodes are mostly clean of defect, which is in a way amazing considering how they’ve used those same stock shots of the Melrose Place pool for five seasons now. In his own way the stock shot pool boy should be considered a regular on IMDb. Digressions aside, the image is perfectly acceptable, and at least a step up from the SOAPNET airings.


The music doesn’t fare so well. Like with all the previous seasons on versatile disc, these episodes have had their music swapped with royalty free garbage. Some of those post-credit tunes are just painful to sit through. The plus side is that no episodes have been edited content wise like they were in Season Two (when an entire Billy Campbell karaoke subplot was removed to avoid paying rights for a Neil Diamond song), but then again, there were no real songs incorporated into any of the narratives. Seasons six and seven get problematic when Kyle brings in a bunch of (at the time) big acts like Tal Bachman and those crazy MMMBoppers to his After Hours bar and jazz club. These guys were featured throughout the episodes, so I fear for the future of our favorite apartment complex on DVD. The episodes are supposed to be stereo, but I must have soap suds in my ears because all I hear is mon to the izzo.



extras...

There is little incentive supplement wise for paying the rent this season. Nadda.

wrapping it up…


There’s only one place I want to live, and it ain’t with Dawson, it ain’t in Beverly Hills or One Tree Hill and it sure as hell isn’t The O.C. Melrose Place is what prime time soap opera is all about, equally apt to taking a lead character over the deep end as it is taking them to bed with a different lover. The love triangles, squares and pentagons come as fast and furious as Paul Walker and with Locklear, Cross and Rinna en camp, there’s more bitch here than Lassie. The fifth season was so bulging at the seams from all the new characters that they’d virtually get a whole new sweater by the sixth season, but for old Melrose fans, this is the last of the original cast. While the sex, drama and sex here doesn’t compare with the heyday of seasons two to four, it’s still top notch TV that deserves to perch atop the soap opera canon. Heather, next time I’ll grovel at your feet without pay.

overall... Content: A- Video: C Audio: C+ Extras: F Final Grade: B