Gossip Girl begins its third season by spinning its wheels; whether that is a sign that is just picking up needed speed or that the show is retreading tired ground remains to be seen. Many plot threads that were set up in last season’s finale (Lily and Rufus’s son Scott, Serena’s father, Chuck and Blair) unwind as you would expect them to: Scott makes a secretive approach to the father who thinks he’s dead, while Serena acts out to try to get the attention of a father that might as well be. Meanwhile, Chuck and Blair seem happy, but are they really? The episode practically writes itself (except for the horse chase), which is never a good thing.

At times one wonders whether Gossip Girl is worth examining in detail, and if it wouldn’t be easier to just do a plot summary sprinkled with snarky attempts at wit (the m.o. of Television Without Pity, the enemy of intelligent television watchers everywhere). The truth is that thinking critically about a show like Gossip Girl is just as important as analyzing a show like Mad Men. Mad Men and shows such as The Wire and Friday Night Lights are written to theme; they are written as commentary. Their meanings reside primarily in their content. On the other hand, shows like CSI or House or Gossip Girl do not set out to do the same thing: while they may be just as expertly written, any meaning or comment comes less from design and more from organic arrangement of the show’s plot and innate characteristics. Those shows generate meaning from their form.

You may notice that the shows in the second category have far more viewers and are far more popular. This makes it all the more important to think about what these shows are saying. And they do say something; a narrative never exists “just as entertainment.” If it is not explicitly ideological, that means its assumptions and its axioms are unconscious and unspoken, and therefore potentially more powerful. They beg to be teased out and analyzed. Good criticism digs out hidden layers of meaning and places a narrative into a broader context; someone’s gotta frame Gossip Girl.

A transition worth noting is the entry of the Humphreys into the upper-class elite. On the one hand, that would potentially rob the show of one of its sources of dynamic tension: the juxtaposition between the lives of the fabulously wealthy and the not-so-fabulously wealthy. In the first season of the show Dan, Jenny, and Rufus also served as convenient points of entry and relatable figures in what might have seemed to be an alien environment. However, the story had to come to this place sometime. They’ve already acknowledged how laughable it is for Dan to claim “outsider” status at this point, and after several seasons characters that seemed distant and cold, such as Lily and Chuck, have been sufficiently humanized that audiences can relate to them on their own terms.

What is of particular interest is how the Humphreys’ rise recalls the formation of the American labor aristocracy. It may seem ancient at this point, but the United States, like many other industrializing countries, was once plagued with near-continual strikes and riots instigated by the working class.  Elites at the time tried to divide the working class through such concerns as religion, ethnicity, and race, but it wasn’t until years later that they stumbled on a solution that worked. This involved pacifying a large enough segment of the working population with stabs at reform, something facilitated by shifting the worst of the exploitation to the lowest of the low and outside the country. But the potent part of the solution was the cultivation of a mythology, a convenient narrative that said “See what you have? You’re like us. And one day you’ll be rich too, and our problems will be your problems. Therefore you should support policies that help the rich.”

The potency of this mythology, the shininess of the brass ring, is what enables an entire generation of Americans, in the face of growing inequality and massive wealth concentration that hasn’t been seen in a century, to care more about the profits of insurance companies than their own health and to use “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” without irony. The mythology has this power because it’s such a romantic concept — and in Gossip Girl‘s case, it is literally romantic as the Humphrey’s rise comes as a result of Rufus and Lily’s relationship. However annoying it may seem, Vanessa’s concerns in this episode are apt: the suit and the wallet are just trappings — it’s the ideological shift that comes with the material shift that really matters. She isn’t so far off when comparing Dan to Frodo and the One Ring. This mythology of fluid social mobility is so insidious that most of us Americans feel its pull, even if on a subconscious level. The audience of Gossip Girl watches this narrative unfold and part of their brains reminds them that it’s fiction, it’s a soap opera, it’s a fairy tale. But another part dreams, “Wouldn’t that be nice…?”

There is a wealth of material to discuss, including the nature of fatherhood, role-play and virtual narratives, and Gossip Girl’s methods of exposition. But considering the show plans to adopt the slow-starting pace that they ran at last season, there will be plenty of time for that next week.

Cultural references in this episode:

• Jules and Jim is a film directed by Francois Truffaut that was part of the French New Wave and revolves around a love triangle between two friends and a free-spirited woman. It also features one of the most hilarious “dude jumps through a window” scenes in cinematic history.
• Anaïs Nin was a French writer, most notably of erotica and her memoir Henry and June which chronicled her ménage à trois with Henry Miller, author of Tropic of Cancer, and his wife June.
• Truman Capote should be known to Gossip Girl fans as the dandyish American author of numerous books including Breakfast at Tiffany’s, whose film adaptation (starring Audrey Hepburn) has served many times as dream fodder for Blair Waldorf.
• Reversal of Fortune is a book and film about the real-life incident in which Sunny von Bülow, a socialite, fell into a persistent vegetative state; her husband, Claus von Bülow, was accused of injecting her with insulin to induce hypoglycemia but was acquitted after two trials. Coincidentally, Truman Capote was called to testify in regard to Sunny’s drug use.