Let me make it clear that by no means am I a prude and in general I spend very little time (perhaps too little) worrying about how sex, drugs and the like are represented in popular media. (Maybe part of the reason I don’t think about it all that much is because my son is only three and therefore, the years when I won’t be able to just turn off whatever I don’t want to expose him to seem like some far off time in the distant future when kids dress in silver jumpsuits and are hovering off to high school on flying scooters.) When my son’s not around I listen to explicit rap music and I’ve been an ardent fan of more graphic TV shows such as The Wire for years now.
Despite this, on a recent visit back the U.S.A. (I’ve been living abroad for over five years now), I started watching a little hit show I’m sure you all know about called Gossip Girl and for the first time in ages, I found myself to be, well, shocked.
From what I can gather, Gossip Girl is to the current generation of teens what Beverly Hills 90210 was to mine or what The O.C. was to the one that came after. We all know the story- a bunch of privileged, good-looking adolescents who don’t say “um” nearly as much as any teenager I’ve ever met, run around having wittyesque conversation while at the same time wrecking constant havoc in each other’s lives. Some of them are good and some of them are evil while others are just misunderstood. Every so often the evil ones will do something likable just to keep us on our toes and the good ones will feel misunderstood and then the misunderstood ones will try to help and so on and so forth.
Gossip Girl is what happens when you take this formula and then put it on steroids with a shot of coke, literally. Of course there were drugs on 90210 and The O.C. There was also sex and eating disorders and kids with drinking problems. The difference is that on 90210, and to a somewhat lesser extent on The O.C., these things were treated as issues that had serious consequences. If someone had a drinking problem it was the focus of an entire episode. In some extreme cases it even took two or three episodes to deal with the problem!
Gossip Girl is different in that getting drunk, using drugs and having sex in high school are merely seen as par for the course. In one episode I watched, “good girl” Serena van der Woodsen is tormented because she has a secret that she is keeping from her boyfriend. Her friends press her to tell them what it is and finally she gives in and starts to confess. It started with the night she got wasted and slept with her best friend’s boyfriend. Later after drunkenly going to a hotel with some friends, she tries to avoid having sex with one of them by suggesting he do a few lines of coke. He does and overdoses at which point her other friend convinces her to flee the scene. Later she watches as his dead body is carried out of the hotel. In short, teenagers getting wasted, sleeping with their best friends’ boyfriends, and doing coke are not enough shock value for today’s teen audience. There now must be a dead body, a cover-up, and oh, did I mention a secret sex tape gone wrong?
How does watching this sort of TV show influence adolescents? Do they just see the rampant sex and drug use as another part of an exaggerated fairy tale world that they’re logically aware is only accessible to .000001% of the population? Is that supposed to make it okay? Dawn Ostroff, president of The CW network seems to think so, telling the New York Times that “Everybody approached this with the understanding that this was a heightened reality… It wasn’t teenagers as we know them throughout the country.” The thing that’s dangerous about this is that while it’s true that the majority of teenagers are unlikely to ever have access to Park Avenue penthouses and designer swimwear; drugs, alcohol and sex are the one part of this fairy tale that every kid in America does have access to.
In an attempt to ward off criticism Stephanie Savage, one of the show’s producers, told the LA Times that people who say that the show “glamorizes teen drinking and sex” aren’t “really watching the episodes… There’s decision-making, regret and consequences involved.” Oh really? Funny because I haven’t really seen any obvious consequences to the martini glass that seems to be permanently attached to bad-boy Chuck Bass’s hand. But maybe I’m just not watching hard enough.
But what is a parent to do? I honestly don’t know. I’m certainly not the first person to make a fuss over the show. The Parents Television Council has been up in arms since the show’s inception, only to have their criticisms turned into a “clever” ad campaign in which quotes from the PTC about the show (”mind-blowingly inappropriate”), are superimposed over steamy images of the half-nude teen characters. In the end, rather than coming off as sensible and caring parents who may have a point, the critics are seen as a bunch of over-reacting fuddy duddies with nothing better to do than promoting censorship. I’m genuinely curious about how parents of adolescents out there are handling this show and others like it. Any good suggestions?
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