The show ran for six seasons, from 2007 to 2012. Meester was in her early to mid-twenties during the run — old enough to have a professional identity that was separable from the character she was playing, but young enough that the character’s identity was, for much of the general audience, the primary association. The specific risk of playing a character as emphatically recognizable as Blair Waldorf is that the recognition can come to precede the actress. Meester was conscious of this risk and has spoken about it in terms that are more measured than most people in her position would be expected to manage.
## The Industry and the Woman in It
The television industry that Leighton Meester entered at twenty-one, as a series regular in a network drama, was different in important ways from the industry she had been a peripheral part of during her years of guest roles and commercials. A series regular on a successful show is not just a working actress. She is a property, in the specific sense that the entertainment industry uses that word: something in which money has been invested, from which returns are expected, and whose management requires decisions about how it is presented to the public.
The management of her public image during the Gossip Girl years proceeded along the lines that were conventional for actresses in her position in that era: red carpet appearances, magazine covers, interviews that traced the contours of her biography and her relationship to the character she was playing without going deeply into either. She was photographed. She was talked about. She was, for a specific period in the late 2000s and early 2010s, one of the most recognizable faces on American television.