Fun
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Nostalgic
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Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: October 25, 2010
PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: Gossip Girl, “Easy J” (Season 4, Episode 6). [Stream on Netflix]
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: If there was one TV show in the late 2000s that was not hurting for guest stars, it was Gossip Girl. The show’s aggressive approach to Upper East Side verisimilitude meant that it was crawling with not merely cameo appearances but cameos from the kind of rich, white jerkoffs you weren’t used to seeing on TV. Serena, Blair, Chuck and company were constantly running across the likes of Michael Bloomberg and Rachel Zoe and Karlie Kloss. Did we even know what Tory Burch looked like before she graced the Gossip Girl screen?
In the season 4 episode “Easy J,” GG went heavy on the Manhattan-centric cameos and accidentally stepped foot into history. No, I’m not talking about Tim Gunn’s appearance, though his was the most central to this episode in which Jenny Humphrey (Taymor Momsen) returns to New York after having been banished by Blair Waldorf (Leighton Meester) for having slept with Chuck Bass (Ed Westwick). Jenny, who if you recall is a 17-year-old genius for downtown fashion, is back for an interview with the Parsons School of Design, which means she must meet with Tim Gunn himself. Of course, Blair does all she can to sabotage, and Jenny then has to do major damage control. Which includes schmoozing the attendees at a fancy cocktail party sponsored by the New York Observer. And if you’re populating that cocktail party with fancy, fashionable New Yorkers in 2010, and you’re invoking the Observer, you’re casting Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner.
Back in 2010, Ivanka was merely the comparatively more likeable celebutante daughter of a millionaire real-estate swindler who was accusing President Barack Obama of not really being an American, while Jared was her newspaper-owning but otherwise unremarkable husband. Certainly neither one of them seemed to be on track to one day becoming front-line co-conspirators and accomplices to one of the darkest periods in American history. The hindsight on all old Ivanka Trump cameos — Project Runway, for example — reveals the same cultural blind spot: fawning over the idle rich is harmless when they don’t hold visible positions of power. If Gossip Girl were made today, they wouldn’t dare have Ivanka and Jared on to display their unique interpretation of charisma (Ivanka speaks one line as she greets Lily Van Der Woodsen — “Thank you for coming!” — while Jared silently tries very hard not to look directly at the camera). But maybe they’d cast the complicit dauphins of tomorrow‘s kleptocracy. It’s tougher and tougher to see them coming.
The only thing more fascinating than watching Ivanka and Jared through 2010’s eyes is watching Gossip Girl in hindsight. And not just for the guest stars, which at this point in the show’s run included Katie Cassidy, Sam Page (Joan’s husband on Mad Men), and Brooklyn Nine-Nine‘s Melissa Fumero as one of Blair’s headbanded minions. And then there’s the matter of watching Gossip Girl through the lens of the series-finale revelation that Dan Humphrey was Gossip Girl all along. Which means you have to rationalize how Dan Humphrey sent out this snarky blast reveling in the professional ruin of his own sister:
Dan Humphrey as Gossip Girl: it makes re-watching the show intensely enjoyable/insane.
And yet? It’s hard not to feel a certain kind of nostalgia for these waning carefree days before history cracked wide open, and when a decadent New York teen soap didn’t feel like a bad omen. XOXO, Gossip Girl. We miss you in all your preposterousness.
