Gossip Girl suffers from OC Syndrome.

They start at a campy, badass extreme then hesitate, run out of steam and then do things which are campy but not badass at all.

Part of this is because it's network TV and limited in how explicit it can be, even pulling back because teens are involved. Some of the show's risque nature was more alleged than actual. Part of it is the difficulty of maintaining wickedness with familiarity, amplified by producers who seem to have rather limited camp vocabularies.

One thing is for sure, these stories fall apart once high school and the limitations of teen status are removed. No longer are the characters scandalous and pushing boundaries and legal parental control, they're just immature adults exhibiting high school reactions in a college (or beyond) setting.

For most of us, though, the only entertainment this show could provide is if the characters were slammed against a wall and machine-gunned at close range. And the actors who played them ended up working food service in a mall for the rest of their lives.

Those who have not lived think high school is the most important thing to ever happen in their lives. Only the living dead attend reunions.

Everyone else grew up.

High school shows centered around multiple characters, whether it's a group of equals - gossip girl, OC - or it's a one + sidekicks affair - Buffy, Veronica Mars - depend on keeping the group and their storylines tightly knit together, which is of course very easy to do in a confined space like high school, more difficult in a looser one like college. Buffy's transition worked because the scoobies were as tight in college as they were in high school, while all new characters were assimilated slowly and organically - and it was always clear that they would never supersede the original core. In VM season 3, on the other hand, the new characters were central to the storyline from the start, while the main sidekicks only appeared from time to time, making the season patchy at best. Gossip Girl first has to get over the whole characters-going-to-different-colleges thing, then it has to cut down on the personality transplants - mean little J, where are you? Blair with a tortured conscience? Yawn! - then deal with the fact that shallow yet deliciously bitchy shows have only one way to go, which is to step on the bitchyness. If, on the other hand, they go for depth, we're all doomed.

This column as well as anything about TV and movies, as well as the infrequent book and author item will soon be a thing of the past. This is Big Brother Salon, Glenn G on every channel all of the time.