Stephanie Savage Talks Gossip Girl!

March 13, 2009

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Check out this great interview with Jim Halterman of The Futon Critic. He sits down with co-producer Stephanie Savage, where she talks about Gossip Girl and the new spinoff, Lily!

One of the most buzzworthy shows this television season has been the CW’s “Gossip Girl,” which has spent most of its second season showing a ratings upswing and more popularity for the show’s young stars. Executive Producer Stephanie Savage, who helped develop the show with Josh Schwartz (“The O.C.”) from the books by Cecily Von Ziegesar, took a break to talk to our Jim Halterman about what’s in store for the Upper East Siders in the coming months as well as the upcoming “Gossip Girl” spin-off.

Jim Halterman: When I worked on the original “Beverly Hills 90210,” people would come out of the woodwork and quietly confess how much they loved the show like it was a dirty little secret to be an adult fan of a teen drama. Do you ever get that with “Gossip Girl?”

Stephanie Savage: To some degree but, honestly, I was a huge fan of “90210,” the original, when I was in graduate school doing film history and theory but all of my friends loved that show very enthusiastically and had a lot of fun with it in terms of thinking about the images, storytelling and the way it related to popular culture. I just loved to be able to watch it on Wednesday nights. It helped get me through my week. I think a lot of people embrace “Gossip Girl” the same way. Not so much a dirty little secret because obviously it’s been embraced by some pretty high-level culture in terms of The New York Times is very positive. Vanity Fair magazine. Blake [Lively, who plays Serena] has now been on the cover of Vogue and W magazine. It’s not something to be embarrassed about. It’s very much a part of the culture. On the blogosphere, a lot of very intelligent people have embraced the show. For example, I’m staring at an e-mail on my computer that Cecily Brown is going to let us use one of her paintings on our show and she’s one of the greatest contemporary artists of our time and she’s a fan of “Gossip Girl.” It reaches people beyond what the normal audience might be but I don’t think it needs to be a dirty little secret.

JH: If you look at the traditional Nielsen ratings the numbers aren’t huge but obviously we’re moving into a time where the networks have to look at more than that and your show is a personal example. What do you think of the different platforms and how they contribute to the popularity?

SS: I think our audience is one of the youngest audiences on television in terms of the median age of our viewers and so you’re only going to see more and more of this with other shows as younger people start to get older but their habits remain the same. I think for those of us who grew up when I did television habits are just completely different now than they used to be. And the CW, to their credit, has been very smart and very supportive of us in understanding that. When we got our pickup in season one, we definitely didn’t have the ratings to justify that but they were very in tune to DVR numbers and iTunes and the amount of streaming that was happening online and they took all those factors into consideration when they picked us up.

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