Teenage kicks: How Gossip Girl is changing TV

A teenage drama set in New York's exclusive Upper East Side has become the hottest thing in showbusiness – and is changing the way the world watches television. As Britain falls under its vacuous spell, Stephen Foley explains how a soap about over-privileged rich kids turned into the talk of the town...

They've been filming Gossip Girl across from the offices of The Independent's New York bureau, and we're excited. The Palace hotel on Manhattan's Madison Avenue is where Serena van der Woodsen, the show's Venus-in-skinny-jeans, is living with her mother while their uptown apartment is being given a high-class makeover. The hotel, of course, is owned by the Bass family, whose over-privileged teenage son Chuck has a whole suite to himself.

Now, I must confess that we've not caught a glimpse of either of them so far. But we're on the blogs waiting for the latest sightings, and might even be willing to travel – all in the interests of journalistic research, of course – to the Upper East Side, where most of the action is set. Alternatively, we'd pop into the Palace for a light lunch and slip upstairs for a bit of corridor stalking. Or at least, we might if Gossip Girl were real life, the Van der Woodsens and the Basses weren't made-up characters, and the Palace wasn't really owned by someone else entirely.

It's difficult to unpick reality from fiction when discussing Gossip Girl, a television show that has got New York's gossips in even more of a lather than Sex and the City did in its heyday. For those who haven't cottoned on yet, the show – like the wildly successful teen book series on which it is based – follows a gaggle of exclusive private-school kids from the ultra-monied Upper East Side as they fall in and out of love, as they plot, scheme and bitch, and as they work their way through the hottest of the city's bars, music venues and designer labels. It is New York as a sort of candy store, for them and for the viewer.

In the US, Gossip Girl is currently the hottest thing on television, watched by the sexiest demographic and feted by an industry which believes that – in the ways it has been shot, created and marketed – it showcases the future of television. In the UK, it is fast becoming a cult; indeed, ITV2 yesterday screened six straight hours of the show, allowing viewers to catch up with every episode screened so far.

For those who are now addicted to Gossip Girl, it's a time-consuming pursuit. Because it is not just a matter of tuning in for an hour a week; it's also a matter of diving head-first into a whole world, played out on the internet, where the characters and the people behind them are hard to separate, and where updates come not just in one-hour chunks every week, but in excited blog posts and "sightings" of the characters and the actors flashed to us 24/7.

In other words, the TV show presents a typical teenage world in this age of social networking, web-enabled camera phones and absolutely no privacy whatsoever. Josh Schwartz – the show's producer, whose previous hit The OC was just as full of unblemished youngsters and aspirational backdrops, but never quite made it out of cult status – seems to have a genuine mega-hit this time, and one that will see him hailed as the world's hottest and greatest TV boss; the man most in tune with the zeitgeist.

For now, though, Schwartz's hit is also scaring the hell out of television executives. To them, Gossip Girl is a glimpse of tomorrow's world. And – for the men in suits who have for years controlled the world's greatest mass-market communication tool – it looks a bit like anarchy. The show's narrative is told through the eyes of the eponymous, always anonymous "Gossip Girl" – a blogger in the midst of its well-heeled characters, who relays the what-they're-wearing, who-they've-been-kissing details about their lives with an eyebrow arched as high as ours.

In the show, Gossip Girl is silkily voiced by Kristen Bell, star of Veronica Mars, but she exists in various forms on the net, too, on promotional sites run by The CW, a young-and-hip new TV channel that first commissioned the series in the US, and by other major broadcasters who have since picked up the show. But these are just the tip of the iceberg, as blog begets blog begets blog, and numerous fan-sites spring up. There are places to dissect the latest bitchy outpourings from Blair Waldorf, Serena's friend and rival. There are places for discussing the real lives of the programme's stars – for OMG-ing about how Chace Crawford, who plays son-of-a-banker Nate Archibald, has dumped American Idol winner Carrie Underwood by text message and been seen about town with Rumer Willis, spawn of Bruce Willis and Demi Moore.

There are places to discover that Lydia Hearst, a scion of a real-life rich family, is shooting a future episode of the show. Places to gossip about whether Blake Lively and Leighton Meester have fallen out over who is the bigger star, mirroring the rivalry between Serena and Blair over who is queen bee at school. There are places to score each new episode for how "real" or "fake" it is compared to the real lives of New York's most privileged teenagers. Even the stars have blogs. Michelle Trachtenberg, the former Buffy the Vampire Slayer star who turns up as an evil blast from Serena's past, was burbling on on the Cosmopolitan website recently about how fabulous it was to be picking out the Jimmy Choo booties, the Ya-Ya jacket and the Tom Ford shades to be worn by her character – and about her own line of jewellery, available nationwide soon, natch.

And there are places, too, to report where the actors are filming, dining and partying, since they are fast becoming some of the hottest young properties in the business. They are regular fixtures in the newspaper gossip columns and on celebrity websites such as Gawker, which plots sightings on a New York City map. A publicist for the show recently tried placing an item in the New York Post's must-read diary column, Page Six, about Leighton Meester and a "hot male companion" dining together at a fashionable restaurant, and Page Six snapped it up. Publicising a TV show with a little well-placed gossip about its stars is hardly new, of course. Page Six hacks are pretty long-suffering when it comes to tip-offs from desperate public relations execs. The Meester-Lively rumours echo the "Desperate Housewives stars hate each other" chatter that was heard when that soap first started sudding. The difference with Gossip Girl is that this time, with this audience, and in this era of constant communication, the gossip is feeding on itself.

Yet, for all the excitement, magazines are only belatedly starting to put the stars on their covers, eight months after the programme first aired in the US. It has been a slow-burning hit. Why so slow? The answer lies in another problem that sets fact against fiction. The viewing figures for this show are not real. For months, the real viewing figures have been understating the impact of Gossip Girl among teenagers. And the reason for that is that teenagers are not watching it on TV. They are watching it on websites.

The CW streamed the early episodes of the show on its website – before the writers' strike – for watching whenever people wanted. Gossip Girl addicts are also paying to download it to watch on their iPods and mobile phones at their convenience. Whisper this, but they are also downloading it using file-sharing software, neither paying for it nor having to sit through commercials, nor having to sign up to be spammed by advertisers. Take a quick look at a file-sharing website and it is quickly clear that Gossip Girl is among the most popular shows being swapped by users, often ranking No 1. On iTunes, Gossip Girl accounts for 15 of the top 100 TV show purchases in its latest US chart, and all six of the episodes available in the UK store are ranked in the top 30 there.

The CW was pretty confident that it had found a flagship show that would establish its new network, founded in 2006 and designed to appeal to advertisers, who positively salivate over reaching the teenage and twentysomething demographic. But The CW's viewing figures have actually been worse on average this year than in the channel's debut year. Gossip Girl managed a measly 3.5 million viewers when it premiered, and the following week there were a million fewer. It has been the same story in the UK, where Gossip Girl debuted on ITV2 on 28 March. That first show averaged fewer than 300,000 viewers, some 30 per cent below the level the channel might expect for its time slot. Because the channel hopes that it still has a slow-burn success on its hands, yesterday it ran one of those "new viewers start here" sessions that digital channels can use to reignite interest, sweeping away its bank holiday schedule to run the first six episodes back to back.

TV bosses hope against hope that making shows available on the web will build new income for them, whether it be from ads alongside video streaming or actual money in the bank from viewers who buy it on iTunes. The risk is that the internet will do to television what it has done to the music industry – that is, decimate it. For now, the industry is facing both ways – and is nervous as hell. The CW prompted an outcry from fans by saying it would stop streaming new episodes on its website, in an attempt to force them to make an appointment to view with the channel itself.

As for how ITV2 will fare, who knows? There are already plenty of British Gossip Girl addicts who can't wait for the show to be dribbled out weekly on TV and iTunes, and who watch the US episodes on the web, or file-share the shows as they are ripped off US television and swapped using BitTorrent. "The show is a new beast," Josh Schwartz said in a magazine interview. "It shows that the old system of measuring audiences isn't relevant when it comes to a show like this, which is for this kind of audience. It's affecting Gossip Girl radically right now, but in the next two years it's going to have a radical effect on all of television. It's incumbent on all the networks to figure out how to measure that. Otherwise, it's just going to look like they're losing viewers when, actually, they're not."

The change in viewing habits is starting to be mirrored across the industry, in the diverse range of programmes aimed at commercially attractive young audiences. "We can't stick our heads in the sand," said Bruce Rosenblum, the head of the Warner Brothers Television Group, last week. "My 20-year-old daughter and her friends are watching One Tree Hill and Pushing Daisies, but not on television. They're watching on laptops and cellphones. Here's the interesting part – to them, that is television."

Rosenblum was speaking at the launch of a whole new web venture, called the TheWB.com. The WB was the old channel that was subsumed into The CW two years ago, and the resurrected brand on the net will show a mix of old shows (including The OC and Friends) and new commissions – including, they hope, a music show being developed by Gossip Girl's Schwartz. The shows on TheWB.com will, of course, be available at any time of the day or night, whenever viewers choose to click on them. Yes, it's anarchy out there. Rosenblum called it an "evolution", but he might have put an "r" in front of that. TV executives have been resisting putting genuinely new content on the web, filling up new sites and services such as Hulu and Joost with classic programmes and bitty, low-budget niche nonsense. But the dawn of full-length TV on the web is cracking.

Bobby Tulsiani, who researches digital media for Jupiter Research in New York, says that broadcasters have to get out of old habits if they are to reach the Gossip Girl generation. "Experiences that limit content to particular time windows or number of episodes will continue to frustrate mainstream consumers," he says. A majority of people would still rather watch their favourite shows on a TV set, but it's a slim majority, and young people are already switching. About 15 per cent of all internet users are happy to watch full-length TV shows on the net, Jupiter says. A vastly bigger percentage than that already watch shorter clips, since YouTube – initially just a ghastly 24-hour version of You've Been Framed – grew up and went mainstream.

"While consumption of full-length TV shows has been limited in past year, the genre may finally be ready for 'internet prime-time'," Tulsiani said. And as Gossip Girl heralds – and as the excitable teenage fans outside The Independent's offices and at all the other filming locations will attest – soon, all the time will be prime time.