Tonight's Gossip Girl could have resulted in a Jenny Humphrey date rape were it not for professional hero-for-hire Nate Archibald. How did he find her in time to stop it? Luckily, his cell phone had a Google app for that.

It's hard to read the Observer's profile of Taylor Momsen without comparing the Gossip Girl star to Miley Cyrus. Both celebrities are 15, and both must strategically handle the news media's desire, however subtle, to examine them as sex objects. The game is especially tricky for Cyrus, whose audience is heavily pre-teen and whose show lives on the Disney Channel. She must disavow racy photo spreads in the traditional media even as her underwear cell-phone pictures leak online. Momsen has an advantage: Gossip Girl is about teen sex, and high school kids otherwise acting like adults. So the actress, who plays Jenny Humphrey on the show, doesn't have to feign outrage when the Observer talks about her "coltish beauty," or says "her legs are epic, long and stretching out from here to forever," or runs a picture selected, it would seem, to illustrate the latter. The adult positioning also draws to the child star a bankable, cultlike adult following, as illustrated in the profile:

As if the heat finally breaking was not good news enough, now comes word (or rumor, at least) that a Gossip Girl spin-off is in the works. The potential series would roughly follow the It Girl series of books, which were spun-off of the Gossip Girl novels when the littlest Humphrey, Jenny, decided to reinvent herself and head off to a tony boarding school in "New York horse country". A boarding school setting is great because it promises class warfare, upstairs-downstairs townie romances, and snobby boys who show up to dances and spike the punch. (The show will be set in 1958, right?)