Oh hey there! On the cover of this week's Entertainment Weekly Fall TV Preview is Gossip Girl, that much crowed-about teenage soap opera about horrendous idiots milling about the Upper East Side of that island across the river from me. You see, it's the buzziest show in a buzz-happy medium, people like gossips and the internet are writing about it and legions of squealing, sexually-awakening girls are flocking to its mop-topped (and bottomed) male leads as if they were sex magnets, and these young ladies mere paperclips. But there's just one little thing, one nagging flaw that the accompanying article has to attend to. If it's so damn popular, why isn't it... popular? Yes! The show gets abysmally low ratings—it was 150th in the listings for last year. The article trots out all the old horses: it's internetting, it's DVRing, it's being secretly downloaded into vaginae nationwide! Which, fine, might be true. But the real answer to this ratings mystery is that the show can't possibly live up to the mind-numbingly loud buzzzz. It's kind of a self-perpetuating animal, this Gossip Girl frenzy. People click and then you write more and then people click more and then you write more and so on and so on until you are nothing but Frankenstein chasing his monster to the ends of the Earth, hoping—mad and frothing—to one day destroy it. I talk about the show like it's my damn job or something (wait a tick!) and I don't even like it! You heard that? I don't like Gossip Girl. I like what it could be, but what it is currently is something like a soggy piece of celery. All bland flavor and diminished crisp. And that's why it gets low ratings! Because it's not good. And no one really, sincerely, in the deepest recesses of their hearts, gives a shit. It's like the election. Errrrbody's all talkin' about Sarah Palin and doing side-splitting parody and all that, but come November 4th ain't but a half of those people who are gonna vote. That's just history! What the CW (the "network" that airs the dreck) needs to do is actually rein in the buzz a bit. It's gotten to the point where you seriously don't need to watch the show in order to have some sort of informed "30 is the new zygote!" with-it conversation. "Oh yeah I totes saw that photo of Blake and Chesterly kissing while Credenza and Toucan Sam looked on. Yeah. What a moment." It's not hard. Let's create a little more mystery, with just the occasional tease here and there. It will make my job a mite bit harder, but the show could maybe attain that level of "oohhh what isss it??" curiosity that other oddities like the original 90210 developed, to great success. (That was before the internet. Sigh. Simpler times.)