'Gossip Girl:' Let's play dress-up

So "Gossip Girl" is back, and wittily self-aware, as Matthew notes, and yet there's something about the show's appeal to the underage-and-barely-legal crowd that I still can't quite figure out. Yes, I understand the interest in sex, great clothes, and the occasional game of croquet. But this show feels like nothing but a giant and mildly-pretentious game of dress-up. It's purportedly set in a high school, but with none of the teenage-self-discovery themes that made classics of (I'm dating myself) "Heathers" or "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" or (I'm down with you, kids) "American Pie." Everyone behaves like an alcoholic 40-year-old. At least new cast member Madchen Amick has an excuse.

Tonight's premiere, set almost entirely in the Hamptons, barely mentioned school at all. As Ed Westwick, as Chuck Bass, skulked around his mansion, he might as well have been wearing a smoking jacket. And in both her physical appearance and her line delivery, Blake Lively makes Mischa Barton look like a Cabbage Patch doll. I'm no great fan of ABC Family's popular "The Secret Life of the American Teenager," but at least those kids, derivative as they are, act nominally like kids.