Gossip Girl - Season 2
Zee Café, Monday, 10 PM
Rating **

What’s it about?The hugely successful teen book series Gossip Girl is back in the second season of its TV avatar and it’s not lost any of its scandalous charm. Blair Waldorf and her high-society friends continue to scheme and manipulate their way through their surprisingly hectic life. The season opens with the omniscient but unseen narrator ‘Gossip Girl’ saying that unlike the rest of us, sex, lies and scandal do not take a summer break. The season then proceeds to fulfill this statement as it traces the society brats enjoying their summer break at the Hamptons. Blair charms a mysterious stranger Marcus, while her ex-boyfriend Nate Archibald has an affair with a married woman. And if that’s not enough, Nate is supposedly dating Blair’s best friend Serena van der Woodsen, who is still in love with her ex-boyfriend Dan Humphrey. All this is further complicated by the Archibalds’ financial crises and the revelation that Marcus is an English Lord, whose stepmother Catherine is the one that Nate is having an affair with. How these students of a private school in Manhattan’s Upper East Side sort out their complicated affairs of the heart, is what the rest of the season is all about.

Who’s in it?The lead characters Blair and Serena are played very effectively by Leighton Meester and Blake Lively. The girls lend the right amount of vulnerability to characters that would otherwise be very unsympathetic. Meester is especially good as the Queen Bee of the exclusive school circle, as she very effectively brings out the manipulative and yet, oddly likeable characteristics of Blair. The rest of the cast includes Penn Badgely as Dan, Ed Westwick as Serena’s step-brother Chuck and the latest It-boy of American television Chace Crawford as Nate.

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