Gossip Girl Update

We saw some redeeming material on this past week's X-Mas edition of our new/old favorite show. First off, there was NO Guitar hero action.
Second, there were some poignant touches of realism. Serena learned that when a guy doesn't wear a watch... it's because he doesn't wear a watch, not because he's waiting to buy you a real expensive one. It was further quite believable to cast Dan as a promising young writer with work published in the New Yorker. Finally, Vanessa revealed herself to be simply overbearing in the "best friend" role, and ASM and I were happy to see her called out by Blair. Who would think of such stupid X-Mas gifts anyway... I was actually hoping that Serena would have all her hair cut off, and Dan would buy her some bobby pins or mousse or something.
The newly introduced Roman character was a breath of fresh air. It was good to see French finally peppered liberally on such a high-profile television show. The choice of "Roman" as a name is significant, in part due to its echo of the highly novelistic plotting of the show. A mirror along the boulevard indeed! (This line of though is invalidate, however, if his name is actually Romain, and the pronunciation of the characters was just off.) Here's hoping for future appearances of Roman in this excellent drama.
Another thing... what's up with no one involved in the show having a normal name: Penn? Blake? Leighton? Chace? What's up with that? No Amare or Gilbert? I guess my progeny won't have the opportunity to be in a show as good as Gossip Girl.
Lastly, congrats to the GG team on being named by People magazine as one of the top ten TV shows of 2007. Well deserved laurels, if you ask me.

A note about our posting: As some of you know, Monkey and I faced certain complications during our migration from the North Central AZ to Athens, GA. This has deprived us of computer and Internet access for some time. Otherwise, of course, I wouldn't have waited so long to comment on last week's episode.

A shout out to the fam for allowing use of their Internets.