-Patrick, The Pop Fix (http://thepopfix.com/2009/01/02/for-the-fans-of-dan-a-closer-look-at-gossip-girl/)
Dan Humphrey is the ideal hero-protagonist for a show so steeped in temptation as Gossip Girl. He's smart, idealistic, handsome in a boring-but-steady way and, with insightful lines like "You ever think your mom acts like she's perfect because she's too far from it to acknowledge that she's not?", dude is quite the wag. We can almost see him sitting in the Columbia University staff break room in 20 years, dressed in the bespoke tweed blazer he seems destined for, telling humorous tales about Jonathan Safran Foer's later years to enraptured day-off faculty hangers-on.
But of course, in Gossip Girl's commodified world, you need something super to hang your hat on. This can be ridiculous quantities of money/power (Chuck Bass), tabloid hotness (Serena), or biggety-balls (Jenny). Even wealthy-hot characters like Blair or Nate are relegated to a second echelon for not using their assets to enough effect. That's why average-joe Dan Humphrey needs a superpower, and writing seems to work with the show's writers' need for an identiable protagonist.
There's only one problem here, and it's a big problem for a phenom like Dan, whose writing styles have supposedly earned himself slush-pile salvation from the fiction editors at The New Yorker, and unreal love from The Paris Review, New York Magazine, and overly lionizing bloggers everywhere. His writing sucks.
From his first story, the one that earned him that Paris Review staffer mentor who bails him out of jail in the middle of the night:
The cigarette dangled from her cherry red lips. She took long drags from the cancer stick like an asthmatic would take from an inhaler. "I can make your wildest dreams come true," she whispered in his ear.
He laughed and shook his head. "No, I can make your wildest dreams come true. Don't you know who I am? I'm Charlie Trout."
The lady of the night was taken aback. Who exactly was this imperious man standing in front of her? And was man even the right word for this hedonist? At just 17 years young...
Ok, so there's no real way to get such recognition at such an age, and it's cool that the show's writers admitted as much by mailing this screenshot with such hilarious cliches.
As for the second story, the real life writers of New York Mag -- or at least the bloggers -- have this to say (http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2008/11/gossip_girls_great_expectation.html):
The envelope Dan leaves for Bart Bass contains a note scrawled in such teenage penmanship and, at last, our first true glimpse of Dan's writing "chops." We paused as the camera illuminated a portion of the preternaturally sophisticated prose that got Dan a story in The New Yorker, a mentor at The Paris Review, a letter of recommendation to Yale, and a feature assignment with our own magazine, and transcribed what it said word for word:I hope whatever Ivy League intrigue the show has for Dan next season doesn't keep the kid from taking careful notes in his first-year English survey.Charlie's Birthday didn't just signify his aging. It also represented the anniversary of his mother's death. She died while giving birth to him all those years ago. Charlie's been living with that grief ever since Charlie's father, media tycoon [something] Trout, had never wanted to celebrate his son's Birthday. There were no Birthday parties for little Charlie. There weren't even Birthday cakes. Nor were their gifts. A Lego set or a toy fire truck were never waiting at the foot of Charlie's bed when he awoke on his Birthday morning. All he ever got was a deposit into his bank account.WHAT. Plus only 2, because while of course Dan is an awful writer, his subjects should at least agree with his objects and what have you. And why is he capitalizing Birthday like that? Also, Chuck and his dad should totally have bonded over this.
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