Rogueish

You know how according to the previews every episode of House is the most SHOCKING episode EVER? It occurs to me that Gossip Girl has actually been following a policy of making each episode less shocking than the last. Not in the sense of the diminishing returns of repeatedly attempting to be shocking, but by actually continually dialing down the scandal and reducing the stakes. Aside from being set in high school where social ostracism and meanness can have a pretty big effect on your life, the early episodes presented the Upper East Side as a debuached world where one constantly risked rape, drug overdose, or imprisonment; now, the main risk seems to be that if Dan is seen to be dating Serena, his publishers may not take seriously his literary pretensions. Following the usual TV pattern for the escalation of debauchery and danger, by this point we should be seeing Georgina Sparks as some kind of fascist science villain constantly launching zeppelin attacks on Manhattan from her Salo-esque seraglio. Which is a show I would watch.