## Gossip Girl Ends and What Came After
Gossip Girl ended its run in December 2012, with the sixth season’s finale revealing the long-kept secret of the anonymous blogger’s identity. The show had run for six years, produced 121 episodes, and generated a cultural impact that extended beyond its viewership numbers into fashion, into the aesthetic language of a certain strand of early social media culture, and into the persistent associations that attached themselves to the actors who had played its characters.
The specific challenge of life after a long-running television show — especially one that has been as culturally present as Gossip Girl — is one that most actors who have been through it describe in terms of negotiating with an audience’s settled idea of who you are. The audience that knows you as Blair Waldorf carries that knowledge into every subsequent role, measuring the distance between what you were and what you are doing now. The measurement is not always generous.
Meester has navigated this with what appears to be a deliberate strategy of variety: theatrical work, television work across different networks and formats, films of different scales and tones. Her Broadway debut came in 2014, in a revival of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men at the Longacre Theatre, directed by Anna D. Shapiro. The cast included James Franco as George and Chris O’Dowd as Lennie. Meester played Curley’s wife, a character who has one of the most dramatically significant and emotionally demanding arcs in the play — a woman whose marriage to a jealous, volatile man has isolated her on a ranch, and who reaches out to the farm workers in her loneliness with consequences that define the play’s climax.