Post by -Mother Chucker- on Sept 18, 2008 14:44:48 GMT -5
What's next for 'Gossip Girl,' and how it will avoid the fate of 'The O.C.'
Josh Schwartz, executive producer of the CW’s “Gossip Girl,” has specific goals for the show this season.
You wouldn’t think the soap, which follows the lives of rich teenagers in New York City, would require any major surgery. After all, on Sept. 14, “Gossip Girl” got its highest-ever ratings, drawing 3.7 million viewers.
And Schwartz doesn’t have any radical changes in mind for the CW show, which airs Mondays at 7 p.m. on WGN-Ch. 9. But he also doesn’t want to repeat the mistakes he made with his first big hit, “The O.C.,” which debuted on Fox in 2003.
“For me, the big goal with ‘Gossip Girl’ is to have learned from ‘The O.C.,’” Schwartz said in a recent phone interview.
He and fellow “Gossip Girl” executive producer Stephanie Savage “don’t ever want to feel like we’re sacrificing the characters to try to tell overheated stories,” Schwartz said. “There’s outrageousness to [some things that occur]. I guess if you wrote them down, they’d seem crazy and huge, but hopefully they still feel emotional and grounded and not so insane all the time that you feel like you’ve lost track of reality.”
So what were the other lessons he learned from “The O.C.”?
“No. 1, don’t do 27 episodes in the first season,” Schwartz said. And don’t wait six months to debut the second season of the show, as happened with “The O.C.”
“We really pushed and pushed to get ‘Gossip Girl’ back up on the air as soon as possible,” Schwartz said of the show, which returned Sept. 1 with a set of summery episodes set in the posh Hamptons.
The main goal this year, he said, is to keep the characters’ lives emotionally “grounded,” even as the show depicts the lifestyles of Manhattan’s rich and infamous (at least to the readers of the fictional Gossip Girl blog).
“It’s something that happened on ‘The O.C.’ … you can turn the burners up too high and overcook the story, and suddenly you feel like you have the incident every week,” Schwartz said.
Another pitfall for a show of any age is guest-star overload, but Schwartz plans to keep the focus on the main characters while adding some new faces: Wallace Shawn will play a love interest for designer Eleanor Waldorf (Margaret Colin), the mother of social queen Blair (Leighton Meester); popular high schooler Serena (Blake Lively) will get a new potential love interest, Aaron Rose (John Patrick Amedori); and “O.C.” veteran Willa Holland will join the show as a hard-living Waldorf model who takes the more innocent Jenny (Taylor Momsen) under her wing.
“She’s a really bad influence on the less wealthy but increasingly worldly Jenny, who will “start to grow up quick,” Schwartz added.
“The key is I think, yes, you have to introduce new characters, but they can’t overwhelm the storytelling. It’s really about your core characters and taking what people liked and invested in without changing it too radically too quickly,” Schwartz said.
One thing that will change: Dan (Penn Badgley) and Serena, a star-crossed couple who broke up yet again in the Sept. 14 episode, will not follow the example of “The O.C.’s” Ryan and Marissa, who seemed to part and get back together every other week.
Dan and Serena “have broken up. That is going to stick,” Schwartz said. “They still feel for each other, but we’re not putting them together and breaking them up every week. I have learned that lesson.”
A popular pairing that will get more attention is that of the conniving Chuck (Ed Westwick), who has fallen for manipulative society queen Blair.
“You’ll see the way the season is shaped out – Blair and Chuck play a huge part in it,” Schwartz said. “They had a couple of small scenes together last year… and they were just really funny, there were little sparks between them. Stephanie and I were like, ‘They’re really fun together.’ It grew out of there – the writers all love them and love writing for them. It was a natural place for us to go to this year. It’s really delicious.”
One thing that won’t change, he said, is the depiction of conspicuous consumption on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The family of one character, Nate (Chace Crawford), has suffered financial reverses, but he’s the only character that will be short of cash, Schwartz said.
Despite the current woes of the economy, “these people are wealthy enough to ride out anything,” Schwartz noted.
A few more bits and pieces about the show from Schwartz:
* The scene in the Sept. 14 episode in which three girls approach Dan and Serena and browbeat them about their lives – based on what the girls have read online – was a “nod” to the gossip sites and message boards that obsessively follow the show and the lives of the “Gossip Girl” actors. But the scene wasn’t necessarily a dig at those sites: “It wasn’t about getting back at anyone … [within the show] people read [the site] Gossip Girl," Schwartz said. "Younger and younger people are reading things online, so it’s natural to imagine the next generation of Gossip Girl users in their bedrooms, obsessively following the relationships of the kids who are in high school when they are in grade school.”
* But Schwartz adds that the episode was written by former “O.C.” writer John Stevens, “who shares our meta, kind of self-aware point of view. … It’s a little bit of a nod to New York Magazine’s Daily Intel” and sites like that.
* On the evolution of Chuck Bass: “He was definitely much more straight-up villainous out of the gate last year, and one of the nice things about television is that you start with a character who his a villain but you always intend to evolve. … We’ll start to find out more about his family life. He’s got some fun story lines with some unlikely people – he and Dan end up in jail together.”
* On Chuck and Blair: “They have a lot of common interests. But I think it was important that you see Chuck develop feelings for Blair and even a little bit of insecurity. He’s just so outrageous and Ed Westwick is so great at all that stuff, at totally selling it. But at the same time, you do feel that Chuck’s got a beating heart.” He still yearns for Blair, even though, as Schwartz says, she “is his kryptonite.”
* On how the character of Jenny took off in popularity: “Both Humphreys, Jenny and Dan, were our way into the show. Serena was our heroine [in the pilot] and that was the narrative way in, but it’s hard, because she was a character who was already on the inside. Then she was ousted, so the audience could sympathize, but … Jenny was us last year, taking [the audience] inside. This year, [for her] the wheels start to come off the wagon.”
* On Jenny’s future: “It’s just about growing up fast. It’s not even about good or bad, it’s about coming into her own as a young woman. And as an artist [in the fashion design field]. It’s hard for her dad, who also had his dream when he was young, to look at her and what she wants to do with her life and not be supportive of it. But at the same time, he worries for her trying to navigate this world on her own.”
* On Wallace Shawn as the new love interest for Blair’s mother: “Blair will go up against him, and Blair vs. Wallace Shawn feels like it’s going to be really fun.”
* On the show’s influential fashion, especially Chuck’s outlandish duds: Chuck’s clothes are “based on my wardrobe,” Schwartz joked. But he added that the show’s style was the result of a collaboration between Savage and the show’s costume designer, Eric Daman. “I show up in my jeans and T-shirt and Stephanie walks me through the wardrobe choices and I trust her completely.”
Josh Schwartz, executive producer of the CW’s “Gossip Girl,” has specific goals for the show this season.
You wouldn’t think the soap, which follows the lives of rich teenagers in New York City, would require any major surgery. After all, on Sept. 14, “Gossip Girl” got its highest-ever ratings, drawing 3.7 million viewers.
And Schwartz doesn’t have any radical changes in mind for the CW show, which airs Mondays at 7 p.m. on WGN-Ch. 9. But he also doesn’t want to repeat the mistakes he made with his first big hit, “The O.C.,” which debuted on Fox in 2003.
“For me, the big goal with ‘Gossip Girl’ is to have learned from ‘The O.C.,’” Schwartz said in a recent phone interview.
He and fellow “Gossip Girl” executive producer Stephanie Savage “don’t ever want to feel like we’re sacrificing the characters to try to tell overheated stories,” Schwartz said. “There’s outrageousness to [some things that occur]. I guess if you wrote them down, they’d seem crazy and huge, but hopefully they still feel emotional and grounded and not so insane all the time that you feel like you’ve lost track of reality.”
So what were the other lessons he learned from “The O.C.”?
“No. 1, don’t do 27 episodes in the first season,” Schwartz said. And don’t wait six months to debut the second season of the show, as happened with “The O.C.”
“We really pushed and pushed to get ‘Gossip Girl’ back up on the air as soon as possible,” Schwartz said of the show, which returned Sept. 1 with a set of summery episodes set in the posh Hamptons.
The main goal this year, he said, is to keep the characters’ lives emotionally “grounded,” even as the show depicts the lifestyles of Manhattan’s rich and infamous (at least to the readers of the fictional Gossip Girl blog).
“It’s something that happened on ‘The O.C.’ … you can turn the burners up too high and overcook the story, and suddenly you feel like you have the incident every week,” Schwartz said.
Another pitfall for a show of any age is guest-star overload, but Schwartz plans to keep the focus on the main characters while adding some new faces: Wallace Shawn will play a love interest for designer Eleanor Waldorf (Margaret Colin), the mother of social queen Blair (Leighton Meester); popular high schooler Serena (Blake Lively) will get a new potential love interest, Aaron Rose (John Patrick Amedori); and “O.C.” veteran Willa Holland will join the show as a hard-living Waldorf model who takes the more innocent Jenny (Taylor Momsen) under her wing.
“She’s a really bad influence on the less wealthy but increasingly worldly Jenny, who will “start to grow up quick,” Schwartz added.
“The key is I think, yes, you have to introduce new characters, but they can’t overwhelm the storytelling. It’s really about your core characters and taking what people liked and invested in without changing it too radically too quickly,” Schwartz said.
One thing that will change: Dan (Penn Badgley) and Serena, a star-crossed couple who broke up yet again in the Sept. 14 episode, will not follow the example of “The O.C.’s” Ryan and Marissa, who seemed to part and get back together every other week.
Dan and Serena “have broken up. That is going to stick,” Schwartz said. “They still feel for each other, but we’re not putting them together and breaking them up every week. I have learned that lesson.”
A popular pairing that will get more attention is that of the conniving Chuck (Ed Westwick), who has fallen for manipulative society queen Blair.
“You’ll see the way the season is shaped out – Blair and Chuck play a huge part in it,” Schwartz said. “They had a couple of small scenes together last year… and they were just really funny, there were little sparks between them. Stephanie and I were like, ‘They’re really fun together.’ It grew out of there – the writers all love them and love writing for them. It was a natural place for us to go to this year. It’s really delicious.”
One thing that won’t change, he said, is the depiction of conspicuous consumption on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The family of one character, Nate (Chace Crawford), has suffered financial reverses, but he’s the only character that will be short of cash, Schwartz said.
Despite the current woes of the economy, “these people are wealthy enough to ride out anything,” Schwartz noted.
A few more bits and pieces about the show from Schwartz:
* The scene in the Sept. 14 episode in which three girls approach Dan and Serena and browbeat them about their lives – based on what the girls have read online – was a “nod” to the gossip sites and message boards that obsessively follow the show and the lives of the “Gossip Girl” actors. But the scene wasn’t necessarily a dig at those sites: “It wasn’t about getting back at anyone … [within the show] people read [the site] Gossip Girl," Schwartz said. "Younger and younger people are reading things online, so it’s natural to imagine the next generation of Gossip Girl users in their bedrooms, obsessively following the relationships of the kids who are in high school when they are in grade school.”
* But Schwartz adds that the episode was written by former “O.C.” writer John Stevens, “who shares our meta, kind of self-aware point of view. … It’s a little bit of a nod to New York Magazine’s Daily Intel” and sites like that.
* On the evolution of Chuck Bass: “He was definitely much more straight-up villainous out of the gate last year, and one of the nice things about television is that you start with a character who his a villain but you always intend to evolve. … We’ll start to find out more about his family life. He’s got some fun story lines with some unlikely people – he and Dan end up in jail together.”
* On Chuck and Blair: “They have a lot of common interests. But I think it was important that you see Chuck develop feelings for Blair and even a little bit of insecurity. He’s just so outrageous and Ed Westwick is so great at all that stuff, at totally selling it. But at the same time, you do feel that Chuck’s got a beating heart.” He still yearns for Blair, even though, as Schwartz says, she “is his kryptonite.”
* On how the character of Jenny took off in popularity: “Both Humphreys, Jenny and Dan, were our way into the show. Serena was our heroine [in the pilot] and that was the narrative way in, but it’s hard, because she was a character who was already on the inside. Then she was ousted, so the audience could sympathize, but … Jenny was us last year, taking [the audience] inside. This year, [for her] the wheels start to come off the wagon.”
* On Jenny’s future: “It’s just about growing up fast. It’s not even about good or bad, it’s about coming into her own as a young woman. And as an artist [in the fashion design field]. It’s hard for her dad, who also had his dream when he was young, to look at her and what she wants to do with her life and not be supportive of it. But at the same time, he worries for her trying to navigate this world on her own.”
* On Wallace Shawn as the new love interest for Blair’s mother: “Blair will go up against him, and Blair vs. Wallace Shawn feels like it’s going to be really fun.”
* On the show’s influential fashion, especially Chuck’s outlandish duds: Chuck’s clothes are “based on my wardrobe,” Schwartz joked. But he added that the show’s style was the result of a collaboration between Savage and the show’s costume designer, Eric Daman. “I show up in my jeans and T-shirt and Stephanie walks me through the wardrobe choices and I trust her completely.”
featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/entertainment_tv/2008/09/gossip-girl-omg.html
