Welcome to Fix It, our series examining projects we love — save for one tiny change we wish we could make.
Some shows succeed because they capture a moment. Others succeed because they create one. Gossip Girl (2007) was one of the latter. In the years leading up to the original Gossip Girl, contemporary teen dramas about bored rich kids still had one foot in the realm of reality. But after Blair, Serena, Dan, Chuck, and Nate showed up, the soapy sky was the limit for CW shows that flipped the bird to things like “the law,” “gravity,” “the natural progression of human aging,” and for the purposes of this column, “the general idea that parents remember how many children they have.”
Gossip Girl took place in a world that looked exactly like Manhattan but emphatically and crucially was not. The Campbell Apartment, a real bar hidden away in Grand Central Station, became the place where teenagers have sex during divorce receptions, which are a thing. NYU, a very expensive school with tens of thousands of students, is universally hostile to a rich white girl from the Upper East Side who had great taste in clothes. Up was down, left was right, Columbia was Yale — and that unhinged approach to reality was what made Gossip Girl a masterpiece.
Truth be told, there are a lot of things fixable about Gossip Girl. Chuck Bass, one of the show’s most important romantic leads, was a date rapist. You could count on one hand the number of characters of color who lasted more than a season. And then, you know, pretty much everything else that happened made zero sense at any point. Removing one Jenga block from its teetering tower of balls-out craziness should be done extremely carefully, lest the foundation of a reality where letting your uncle bang your girlfriend in exchange for a hotel is a legally binding method of real estate reacquisition come toppling down.
Removing one Jenga block from its teetering tower of balls-out craziness should be done extremely carefully.
There’s still a block to remove though, or rather one to add back into Gossip Girl in order to resolve a plot problem that had irked people for more than a decade: What the hell happened to Scott?
If you don’t remember who Scott is, don’t worry, neither do his parents. Scott is Lily van der Woodsen and Rufus Humphrey’s son, born in their wild years and given up for adoption before the two of them married different people and had more children of their own. Scott is a legitimate fraternal cord tying Dan Humphrey and his eventual wife Serena Van Der Woodsen together, in the fact that he is half-brother to both of them. There was a whole Season 3 plot where Scott pretended to go to NYU and wormed his way into the Humphrey family’s good graces, only to reveal that he was Lily and Rufus’ son on their wedding day.
Like most of the times a show slams the emergency “long-lost-son” brake, Scott seemed like a huge deal at the time. But after meeting his bio parents at their wedding and promising to spend more time with them later, Scott apparently walked into a black hole and erased himself from reality. Because Lily, Rufus, Dan, Serena, or any of Scott’s other family members on the show never mention him again.
It would be easier to imagine that Gossip Girl didn’t have room for Scott in the latter half of its run, but that’s complete nonsense. This is the show that killed Chuck Bass’ father twice, made Blair the princess of Monaco for half a season, and had the ostensibly less evil of their two female leads abandon a man having an overdose in her hotel room. There is always room for more on Gossip Girl. Scott is the kind of loose end that will always show up on lists and retrospectives about this show because it’s weird enough to stand out amongst the events of a show that specialized in weirdness.
How could Gossip Girl have fixed the Scott problem? It would have been nice if he showed up in the series finale as one of the guest stars shown finding out who Gossip Girl is, but that seems a little clichéd. Maybe he could have been the evil schemer helping Ivy Dickens get her hands on the van der Woodsen fortune, since she was impersonating a van der Woodsen and Scott was actually related to them. Maybe remembering they have a son could have saved Rufus and Lily’s relationship, that could have been cool too.
Or maybe Scott could have taken one look at this biological parents, his siblings who were dating, the Tim Burton nightmare child that was Jenny Humphrey, or the pure evil in Georgia Sparks’s eyes and been like “I regret contacting you, have fun being a bunch of rich sickos who kill people sometimes, lose my number.” Now that’s an exit worthy of Gossip Girl, and perhaps worthy of the only character who escaped alt-universe New York for good.
Gossip Girl (2007) is streaming on HBO Max.
