The show’s writers moved Blair’s character through arcs that were, by the standards of the teen drama genre, unusually complex: her relationship with Chuck Bass evolved from rivalry through manipulation through what the show presented as a kind of love; her ambitions moved from high school social dominance to Yale to a career that the show struggled to specify convincingly; her family relationships — with her fashion designer mother, Eleanor Waldorf, and with the various stepparent figures who moved through the narrative — were the emotional engine that explained Blair’s need for control. Meester played all of these arcs with a consistency that kept Blair recognizable across the narrative shifts, which is a specific technical achievement in long-form television.
## The Show’s Cultural Moment and What It Meant to Be In It
Gossip Girl premiered in September 2007 and became, fairly quickly, a significant cultural presence in a way that went beyond its viewership numbers. It was, at its peak, the subject of the kind of cultural discourse that attaches itself to shows that seem to be about something larger than their plots — in this case, about wealth, about social performance, about the specific culture of American elite adolescence, and about the anonymity of digital observation.
The Gossip Girl blogger, whose identity the show concealed for six seasons and whose observation of the Upper East Side social world organized the show’s framing device, was a figure who functioned differently in 2007 than she would have in a later era. In 2007, social media was not yet the total environment it has since become. Facebook was three years old and had not yet reached the cultural saturation it would achieve in subsequent years. Twitter had launched the year before and was still primarily a technology-sector curiosity. Instagram did not exist. The specific anxiety that the Gossip Girl blogger represented — the anonymous observer who knows everything, who can publish anything, whose omniscience is networked and invisible — was, in 2007, slightly ahead of the actual experience of most of the show’s audience.