You may know Blake Lively as the actress from the critically acclaimed film The Shallows, or due to her marriage to Ryan Reynolds, but she really got noticed due to her in Gossip Girl. The show ran for six seasons from 2007 to 2012, where it focused on the young people born into the rich and elite. An unseen character known as Gossip Girl would write a blog about these people, dishing out all the dirt they had and instigating the show’s events.
Gossip Girl was always a show that would never appeal to men or boys, and was aimed specifically toward young women. But this tactic worked as it got a dedicated fanbase who stuck with the show till the end and only stopped watching because the show decided to be done with. Even now, the replay value for the show is immense and fans have no problems going back to revisit these characters. You might be a huge Gossip Girl fan, but it would be difficult to find out faults in the show that aren’t apparent unless your eye catches them or you think in more depth.
The show did have these mistakes and we’ve compiled a list of these to inform you of them. Some of these are merely production oversights while others are more striking and you’ll wonder how you never spotted them before. In any case, read through without reading too much into them and you’ll have a nice laugh.
Here are 21 Mistakes Fans Completely Missed In Gossip Girl.
Nate’s Haircut
The guys in Gossip Girl were known to be very easy on the eyes, which is what drew a significant majority of female viewers to the show, and it was partly due to their hair that these boys looked good.
But in the Pilot, Nate’s hair does a weird thing by changing lengths. And no, you can’t say he got a haircut between the first scene and the next because the third scene had Nate’s hair exactly the same as the first scene. His hair was short at Eleanor’s party, then became longer, and finally short again
Chuck's Limo
We don’t choose what our faces look like, but everything about Chuck’s face screams an upper-class bad boy. Although he turned out to have a much softer side as the series progressed, and fully by the end, at the start of the show he was a snobbish rich kid.
This was attested by him taking a limo to school. However, this wasn’t always the case, at least going by the Pilot. In that episode, Chuck took the bus like any other kid, and even shared it with Dan and Nate. Following episodes, though, had Dan walking to school while Chuck would never use the bus.
The entire Waldorf apartment
To say the Waldorf’s were well off is certainly an understatement; the family was so crazy rich that a real-life evaluation of their penthouses’ worth fetched an incredible $35 million. It’s a dream home for anyone who lays eyes on it and its price is such that not even the actors in real-life could purchase it.
Then, just imagine how crazy expensive the interior decoration was considering the penthouse looked nothing like it did in the Pilot. It must have been creative changes, but the penthouse was completely different from the one we saw in the first episode, and the family acted as if nothing had changed.
Blair's mother
We should give the family a pass for not realizing their house had changed from the Pilot to the next episode, because these guys were so blind, they never even noticed their own mother changing!
In the Pilot episode, the actress playing Eleanor, Blair’s mother, was someone else entirely and starting from the very next episode we had an actress who looked nothing the original Eleanor did. Of course, in-universe the characters couldn’t reference this but maybe a light-hearted comment as to how different Eleanor suddenly looked wouldn’t have hurt.
Chuck's Mother
Much of Chuck’s characterization in the first two seasons came from the fact that his mother had died and that he had blamed himself for her death, despite not being responsible for it at all. His guilt lasted until the third season when it was revealed she had been alive all along. That’s all fine and dandy, but did Chuck time travel in the Pilot?
We ask this because according to dialogue from the character himself, his mother was alive as of the Pilot. He spoke about her in the present tense, rather than referring to someone who had been deceased for a long time.
The Gossip Girl website
In the finale, it was revealed that Dan had been the anonymous, and eponymous, “Gossip Girl” character all along and had started the blog about the elite of the city. This was retroactively added to continuity because a lot of evidence contradicts this; we’ll overlook those inconsistencies, but the Pilot inconsistency is too striking to ignore.
In the first episode, the website that Gossip Girl runs is nothing like the ones we saw later. The layout was something else entirely, with the presentation also being hardly reminiscent of what it was like after the Pilot.
Jenny's Changing Position
For those of you who don’t know, shooting happens out of sequence and what you see chronologically later in the episode is most of the time filmed earlier on. In the same way, screen takes are also met with gaps where the director wants the shot to be filmed in a different angle.
This is what happened in the episode ‘The Wild Brunch’ where, six minutes into the episode, you could see Jenny laying in bed with her legs down; however, the very next shot of hers – where the scene continues exactly the next second in-universe – her legs are seen up in the air.
Serena's Cellphone
The rich and elite can go and purchase any phone they want pretty much everyday seeing that it’s a minuscule price for them, but it’s ridiculous if the same phone happens to show up in someone’s hand once it’s been disposed of.
This is exactly what happens to Serena in the episode ‘The Wild Brunch’, where she drops her cell phone in the trash only for it to reappear in later episodes. It’s not even a replacement as the phone is exactly the same one she had dropped in the episode. So, did she fish it out because she missed it too much?
Serena's Father's Changing Colleges
We don’t really care about the older people when it comes to shows like Gossip Girl. These shows are made to appeal to teenage girls who love fashionistas and good-looking boys. However, one would definitely re-tread and listen to earlier dialogue about Serena’s father once they realize an inconsistency about him.
In the episode ‘Poison Ivy’, Serena mentions to Dan that her father went to Harvard University, only to change that up and tell Blair that he had attended Columbia University instead. Did she just keep making assumptions about her father’s Alma maters?
Dan and Vanessa's Friendship timeline
When you’ve got an angle about a boy and a girl being childhood friends in a show aimed at teenagers, you just know that those two will end up having a thing at one point. This is what happened with Dan and Vanessa as the two were friends since they were kids and then got together during the show’s events.
But it looks like the two weren’t all that close considering Dan can’t even remember when they first met. At one point, Dan says he’s been best friends with Vanessa since they were 6-years-old; Vanessa herself then says they’ve been best friends since third grade, which isn’t possible because that’s too old for 6-year-olds.
Dan's Cellphone Battery
It looks as if everyone on Gossip Girl loves throwing away perfectly good cell phones for any reason. We covered the part where Serena did it, and now here’s own concerning Dan.
In the episode ‘Woman on the Verge’, Georgina takes Dan’s cell phone, removes the battery, and then chucks the whole thing away. And what do you know? The very next day, Dan has it again in his possession and uses it to call Georgina herself. Now that’s some time traveling that would even leave Doctor Strange to shame. Even if he got the phone back, how did he get the battery too?
Chuck's First relationship
You would expect a bad boy like Chuck to have had his first time with a woman who didn’t really matter to him. All boys from the elite usually like to be with multiple women before deciding there’s more to life than just being physical. In Chuck’s case, this was at first the case, only to become not so meaningful.
At one point, Chuck mentions that his first time had been with Georgina, a main character on the show. Later on, however, he casually mentions that his first time had been with an Italian au pair – not exactly someone who has much meaning to show.
Lily's birth year
People lie about their birth years a lot, especially those old enough to have grown up in times when everything wasn’t computerized. However, when you’ve got a flashback going on, then you can’t pretend there’s a deliberate lie in birth years.
This happened when Lily’s passport showed her birth year to be in 1969. That would put her in her forties in present-day. The episode ‘Valley Girls’, set in 1983, showed Lily driving a car; an impossibility considering she should’ve been 14-years-old at the time and committing an illegal act.
The Loft Door
When two women fight, it doesn’t matter if the world’s ending outside the door – they will hash it out until one emerges the victor. You may or may not agree with this idea, but Gossip Girl sure made it seem that way. Why else would Jenny and Vanessa be absolutely fine with the door to their loft being wide open?
In the episode ‘It’s a Wonderful Lie’, these two ladies were fighting over Nate when behind them the loft’s front door stood wide open, only for it be slightly ajar in the next; then became wide open again. Neither left the room at this time and no one had entered either.
Jonathan Whitney's Name
You can disregard Lily’s passport discrepancy if you want to insist there was a reasonable explanation (which there isn’t), but you can’t conjure an explanation for this goof. In one episode, Andrew Tyler gets a bill for payment, on which Jonathan’s name is written.
However, at that time, the full name was shown to be Jonathan Henry. Later on, though, his name was stated to be Jonathan Whitney. So, is there some sort of fraud going around here that the names are different on papers that can be shown as legal proof?
Olivia's Never-Returning Return
If you were a fan of Hilary Duff from Lizzie McGuire, then you really shouldn’t watch her appearance on Gossip Girl. That’s because not only does she shed her Good Girl image, she engaged in a threeway with Dan and Vanessa!
Unfortunately, we had to mention that because that led to her exit from the show. After figuring out Dan liked Vanessa more during the thing, she left but promised she would come back to try a real relationship with Dan. And what happened next? Nothing. Not only did she not come back, but she also was not referred to anymore either; it was like the show forgot she existed.
Blair's Changing Folders
As mentioned above, filming sequences take a break between two cuts in order to correct an error or some other necessity; in the same way, the scene between Blair and Serena is guilty of this inconsistency.
In an episode where Serena and Blair walk through the Columbia University campus, Blair can be seen holding multiple folders in her hand. In the very next shot of the same scene, Blair is still holding the folders but they aren’t in the same order. Clearly, something happened during filming that required a lengthy break and when the actresses came back they’d forgotten the sequence of the folders.
Serena's Sim Card
This whole cell phone and sim card business is really getting out of hand, isn’t it? But we’ve got the final one for you here. In the episode ‘The Witches of Bushwick’, Jenny steals Serena’s sim card from her phone. You’d think that would be enough for Serena not to receive Gossip Girl Blasts, but it wasn’t.
Not only did Serena receive the Blasts, but her phone also works just fine after this event. Serena never once complains about the disappearance of all the information stored in her sim card and doesn’t bring up this issue at all later on.
Ben texting from jail
Rich people get their own kinds of prisons, but we’re pretty sure you don’t get facilities that can lead you to potentially plot your escape. If that had been the case, then Ben was a fool not to have made use of it seeing that the guy is apparently allowed to use a cell phone while in jail.
How did we catch this error? That would be because Ben texted Juliet while he was supposed to be in jail. An inconsistency between takes is one thing, but how did no one think of this while the scene was being filmed?
The Non-Phone Call
When people talk on phones in TV shows or films, they’re not actually talking to anyone – this much was obviously clear to you. In fact, any person with common sense would know this. But there’s still a requirement to fool the viewer into thinking a character is on the phone.
Gossip Girl couldn’t get this job done as in the episode ‘Rhodes to Perdition’, when Serena calls Max, her phone is shown briefly and you can clearly see it is on the home screen and not in an actual call.