The film career she built across the Gossip Girl years and after was not the film career that produces major awards attention or franchise stardom. It was the film career of a working actress with a specific intelligence about what she could bring to different kinds of roles — an intelligence that the years of guest work and supporting parts had developed. She was not trying to be a movie star in the specific sense that the industry uses that term. She was trying to do interesting work across different formats.
This distinction — between movie star ambition and working actress practice — is one that Meester’s career consistently reflects but that she has not articulated explicitly in her public interviews. The articulation is implicit in the choices: Broadway over a commercial film vehicle, a folk album over a follow-up pop record, Single Parents over a network drama that would have reproduced the Blair Waldorf visibility. Each choice suggests a preference for what she is actually interested in doing over what would most efficiently capitalize on the previous high point of her career.
## Single Parents and the Second Decade
Single Parents, the ABC comedy-drama that premiered in September 2018, gave Leighton Meester her most sustained television presence since Gossip Girl — and gave it to her in a form that was, in almost every measurable dimension, unlike the show that had made her famous.
Where Gossip Girl was high-gloss, melodramatic, and organized around social position among the extremely wealthy, Single Parents was warm, comedic, and organized around the practical challenges of middle-class parenthood. Where Blair Waldorf existed in an environment where every outfit was a statement and every social interaction was a form of competition, Angie D’Amato lived in a neighborhood where the community of single parents helped each other pick up kids from school and navigate the logistical demands of raising children while working.