The Real-Life Gossip Girl

Though the privileged stars of Bravo’s new series, NYC Prep, claim to hate Gossip Girl, they’re modeling their every move after Chuck Bass and Blair Waldorf.

It had to happen: a reality show based on a fiction based on reality. Bravo’s NYC Prep (premiering tonight at 10 p.m.) so slavishly echoes Gossip Girl—which is already based on the phenomenon of superindulged, precociously sophisticated, Champagne-swilling Upper East Side prep-school kids—that watching the new show is like being lost in a hall of mirrors. Has Gossip Girl simply broadcast the students’ types to the world? Or has the drama so influenced the culture that the six people on NYC Prep are now taking cues from its imaginary world? We’ll never sort that out.

We do know that reality shows have always been quasi-fake constructs, the situations manipulated, the scenes edited, the characters shaped as if they were made of Silly Putty. NYC Prep carries that artifice to such an extreme that when these kids drink, hook up, obsess about college, and read gossip about themselves on their BlackBerries, they seem like avatars instead of actual people.

The most dynamic character is PC, a handsome, callous, megarich playboy at 18, blithely spouting what might be the show’s words to live by: “Everything in New York is about money and power.” Chuck Bass—Gossip Girl’s titan of industry while still in high school—could sue for copyright infringement.

NYC Prep carries artifice to such an extreme that when these kids drink, obsess about college, and read gossip about themselves on their BlackBerries, they seem like avatars instead of actual people.

Kelli lives in Manhattan with her brother while her parents remain in the Hamptons (Gossip Girl’s Nate had a similar stretch of being home alone). There’s boyish, womanizing Sebastian (definitely Nate) and more generically Camille, the wholesome looking overachiever who matter-of-factly sets out her life plan: “First, I will go to Harvard.” There’s even a public-school student, wide-eyed Taylor, who is friendly with this rich crowd but knows she doesn’t quite fit in, just like little Jenny from Brooklyn on Gossip Girl. If there is no exact echo of swanning Serena or scheming Blair, it’s because even in their fictional world they live on an Olympian mountain of impossible beauty and privilege.

NYC Prep’s biggest howler arrives when PC’s best friend and former girlfriend, Jessie, is told by a dress shop assistant that she might have stepped out of Gossip Girl. “I hate that show,” Jessie snarls, protesting way too much that the series’ popularity has diluted her elite life with an influx of wannabes, and clutters up her neighborhood with trailers when it films there. But petulant, cranky Jessie (at least as she’s been edited), still carrying a bit of baby fat, is the least Gossip Girl-y of all. Maybe that’s why she seems secretly pleased when the salesperson says, “You guys are the real Gossip Girl.”