Show about wealthy private school kids is proving to be an online sensation with teenagers here, writes Stephen Foley

IT’S the new series which has captured the imaginations of teenage girls throughout the world.

Although ‘Gossip Girl’ has yet to be picked up by an Irish station (and it’s questionable whether it will be), it already has thousands of fans in this country thanks to the fact they are able to download episodes from the web and get regular updates online.

Officially, the viewing figures for Gossip Girl in the US are far from hot – but the figures it has picked up on the web shows the phenomenal following it has. So what’s all the fuss about?

ULTRA-MONIED

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 follows a gaggle of exclusive privateschool kids from the ultramonied 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 Ireland, it is fast becoming a cult. Irish viewers with access to ITV2 were treated recently to six straight hours of the show, allowing viewers to catch up with every episode ever screened.

For those among us 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, webenabled camera phones and absolutely no privacy whatsoever.

Josh Schwartz – the show's producer, whose previous hit was The OC, 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.

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.

SERIES

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.

Tapping into the web’s potential, the stars of the show have their own blogs too. 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.

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.

Take a quick look at a filesharing website and it is quickly clear that Gossip Girl is among the most popular shows being swapped by users, often ranking first place 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, but 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 across the water, where Gossip Girl debuted on ITV2 on March 28.

VIEWERS

That first show averaged fewer than 300,000 viewers, some 30pc below the level the channel might expect for its time slot. Because the channel hopes that it still has a slowburn success on its hands, 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 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 way we watched...

Dawson's Creek

1998-2003

The show that made a star of Katie Holmes was based on the upbringing of its writer Kevin Williamson.

Starring a suspiciously bestubbled James Van Der Beek as the eponymous teenage boy (the actor was 20 when filming started), the Creek ran for 128 episodes.

The show was perhaps most memorable for the dialogue between its teen characters.

It became must-see TV for a generation and also launched the careers of Holmes, who played goodie two-shoes Joey Potter, and the Brokeback Mountain star Michelle Williams.

The OC

2003-2007

Created by Gossip Girl developer Josh Schwartz, The OC was originally pitched to Fox as “the next 90210”. For a time, the show pulled in almost 10 million viewers in the US and was a global hit thanks to its preternaturally beautiful stars and sun-kissed setting – the titular Orange County, California.

But, by season four, the tale of Ryan Atwood, a gentle young hoodlum thrust into world of Orange County's high rollers, had run out of steam and haemorrhaged viewers.

Some critics blamed the killing off of Marissa Cooper, played by Mischa Barton, who was the biggest draw for the sizeable male audience.

Beverly Hills, 90210

1990-2000

By the time it came off air, Beverly Hills, 90210 had been credited with virtually creating modern teen television. It also set the standard for aspirational drama that dares to deal with “real” issues (date rape, suicide and Aids all cropped up in the plots).

Created by Darren Star, the man behind Sex And The City, the show was produced by the late Aaron Spelling.

90210 followed the lives of a group of privileged teenagers coming of age in the upscale LA zip code and made household names of Jason Priestley and Shannen Doherty. Neither has enjoyed much success since, however.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

1997-2003

Buffy, played by Sarah Michelle Gellar, was a teenage girl chosen by fate to battle the forces of darkness. In its heyday, the series, which ran to 144 episodes, developed an unexpected cult following among academic men in corduroy trousers, many of whom have gone on to write books examining the sociological themes of the show.

As for Buffy herself, Sarah Michelle, now aged 31 still commands men’s magazines’ “100 Sexiest” lists. All this despite the fact that she has struggled to win roles in decent films since her vampire-slaying days.