A juicy piece of "Gossip Girl"

The age of the guilty pleasure is dead. Gone are the days when a person had to watch their favorite trashy television secretly and hope that their friends (who certainly had better, more high-minded taste) would never suspect their low-brow leanings. Lindsey Lohan is on the cover of New York Magazine and Perez Hilton runs one of the most popular websites on the internet by drawing lewd doodles on paparazzi photos of the marginally famous. Everything campy and delightful is in, and everyone who wants to have their fun should be watching The CW’s Gossip Girl.

Set in the ritzy, exclusive Upper East Side of Manhattan, Blake Lively and Leighton Meester play Serena van der Woodsen and Blair Waldorf, privileged socialites-in-training who attend the same private high school. In the series’ first episode, Serena is back from a secretive year at a Connecticut boarding school (surprise!) and frienemy Blair panics because of her suspicions that her boyfriend, brooding hottie Nate (Chace Crawford), is secretly in love with Serena (which are totally true, by the way). We also meet Dan Humphrey (Penn Badgley) who is also in love with Serena (does she get all this love because she’s blond?) and his little sister Jenny (Taylor Momsen), both private school outcasts desperate to be on the inside.

All of this intrigue plays out thanks to an anonymous gossip blogger known as Gossip Girl, who publishes the sordid details of the teens’ lives like they’re Hollywood stars, thanks to text tips from other students. Gossip Girl also apparently operates some sort of text alert service to let the school’s population in on the most urgent social news as it happens; she’s a veritable one-woman CNN.

Serena and Blair drink martinis in lavish hotel bars, dress like they stepped straight off the runway (I totally covet Serena’s boot collection, just as I am supposed to), and basically embody the people that every self-absorbed teen was in their own heads. These are the girls that the popular girls aspired to be like in high school.

Gossip Girl requires you to suspend disbelief for an hour once a week. Blair’s desire to lose her virginity to Nate figures prominently in the series’ pilot, but when we see her swilling hooch in a variety of different situations, one has to wonder if a drunken high schooler would really have held on to the v-card this long to begin with.

Well, don’t wonder. Just let it happen. Go with it. The production values on this show are so outstanding, the styling so fabulous, there is no reason to pay attention to things like pesky plot loopholes or the conundrum of teenage drinking. Not since Sex and the City has television given us such a panoramic view of the New York City that everyone dreams about, and the clothes on this show are just as good (and just as unattainable). So mix a few drinks, settle in to the couch with your girlfriends, and have a campy, snarky, fabulous good time. Don’t worry, no one’s going to judge.