Welcome to New York's Upper East Side, where the wealthy and connected mingle at benefits and try to deal with their always-dramatic love lives, not to mention picking colleges. Blair Waldorf is the so-called toast of adolescence in her world; she and her friends, Kati Farkas and Isabel Coates, go to a prep school and fancy parties with their rich parents. Blair is envied by her adversaries because she is thought to have the perfect life, not just because of her gorgeous boyfriend, Nate Archibald, but because she's also planning on getting into her dream college, Yale. With everyone worried about college(or procrastinating on worrying, which everyone seems to be doing), and junior year dragging along, her seemingly perfect life is interrupted by her ex-best friend, the beautiful Serena van der Woodsen, coming back into town after getting kicked out of boarding school. Serena comes back into her life, and into the eyes of Blair's boy friend. When everything Blair knows starts to fall apart, everyone will realize that her life is far from perfect. Will life in the the Upper East Side redeem itself of what it's really supposed to be? Or will the false facade reveal that the rich have the same problems as the not so rich (Jenny and Dan Humphrey), if not more. And just maybe Jenny and Dan are all the more happy with their simple, not-so-expectant lives.
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Penn Badgley has openly connected Joe Goldberg to his old Gossip Girl character Dan Humphrey, calling Joe a warped version of what Dan might have become. He's pointed out that Dan always saw himself as an outsider looking in on privilege, when in reality he was already firmly on the inside the whole time.
Before it was ever a TV show, Gossip Girl was being kicked around as a one-off feature film, and the name attached to play Blair Waldorf at one point was Lindsay Lohan. Wild to picture now given how synonymous Leighton Meester became with the role.
Long before she was an Oscar winner, Jennifer Lawrence actually auditioned for the role of Serena van der Woodsen. The part obviously went to Blake Lively, but it's a fun bit of what-could-have-been casting trivia.
Leighton Meester is naturally blonde, and her first audition for the show was actually for Serena, not Blair. Producers liked her but felt she suited Blair better, so she dyed her hair brunette on the spot because she wanted the part that badly.
Blake Lively and Penn Badgley didn't meet on set like most people assume. They were actually homeschooled together as kids, and their real-life romance picked back up once they were both cast on the show playing Serena and Dan.
Ed Westwick and Chace Crawford, who played on-screen frenemies Chuck and Nate, shared a two-bedroom flat in Chelsea while filming. They first bonded at an Arctic Monkeys gig, and by most accounts Crawford eventually moved out because Westwick was too messy to live with.
Costume designer Eric Daman has said Ed Westwick's polished, suited-up look as Chuck Bass had a genuine influence on menswear at the time, pushing back against the era's more casual, 'Jersey Shore' style of dressing.
Rather than being embarrassed by criticism calling the show inappropriate, the marketing team leaned right into it for season two promos, plastering lines like 'mind-blowingly inappropriate' and 'every parent's nightmare' straight from critics onto the ads.
Blake Lively and Penn Badgley dated for around three years while filming, and when they split in 2010 they kept it so quiet that even the crew didn't find out until months later, on the set of the season two finale.
When Blake Lively started dating Leonardo DiCaprio, the writers apparently drew on it for the show, even shifting filming out to L.A. for a stretch. Writer Joshua Safran later said watching Lively document her life in photos, pre-Instagram, was ahead of its time.
