East Side Story.(Gossip Girl)

Byline: Photographed by Mario Testino

Manhattan is weathering stormy economic times. Yet on Gossip Girl, the pretty young things are partying like it's . . . well, not 2009. Alessandra Stanley talks to Blake Lively about America's favorite fiction.

The scene called for Serena van der Woodsen to saunter down East Sixty-first Street with sunny insouciance, but Blake Lively, who plays the heroine of Gossip Girl, was instead stooped and pale-green with stomach flu.

Shivering in the dank November rain, Lively stood as a makeup woman spritzed her cascade of blonde hair. Her teeth chattered as she wanly assured a concerned member of the film crew, "It's OK; I just need to go to the doctor." Then a production assistant plucked the oversize down coat from her shoulders, and in a black Marc Jacobs overcoat and TA[c] Casan teal suede boots, Lively sauntered while delivering a stream of sisterly advice to Serena's younger brother, Eric, without a stumble or hitch. In the cinematographer's misty, romanticized frame, Serena was as rosily aglow as ever, and so were the town houses in the background. The lens cropped the Upper East Side down to its most stately and prosperous lines, with no trace of the glaring RETAIL SPACE AVAILABLE signs and GOING OUT OF BUSINESS SALE posters one block away, signals that the worldwide recession is lapping at the edges of Manhattan's most privileged ZIP codes.

Now in its second season, Gossip Girl has the ability to make New York City, whatever the meteorological or economic climate, appear, like Serena, dazzling and worldly and optimisticif, indeed, a bit preposterous. This is, after all, a series that presents high school swathed in all the perks of adulthood (sex, cash, alcohol) and adulthood stripped of financial cares or parental responsibilities ("Vanya the doorman used to sign our permission slips from school," Eric reminds his mother, Lily, when Lily tries to argue she wasn't really so neglectful). And it's a show that works for adolescents and parents alike, which is hardly surprisinggeneration gaps are becoming increasingly obsolete in a society where, on-screen and off-, youngsters grow up too fast and parents refuse to act or look their age. It's a nighttime cocktail of a soap, served up dry, with a strong dash of satire. Smart-aleck cultural allusions to everyone from Tory Burch, Giorgio Armani, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Rainer Maria Rilke to Eliot Spitzer (Serena's mother instructs her wedding planner to seat the disgraced former governor "as far away from Serena's table as possible") are aimed at viewers whose cultural map was shaped by watching The Simpsons and South Park. On the other hand, the over-the-top catfights and histrionic lovers' quarrels are gratifyingly familiar to viewers who grew up on Dynasty and Falcon Crest and even All My Children. The two strains mix mostly because of the setting in moneyed, upper-class New Yorkone of the few places where snobbish sophistication and childish fantasy easily intersect.

For this reason, the show's creators and stars see no point in changing the ethos of Gossip Girl to better reflect newer economic realities. "We live in an alternate universe on the show; it's a heightened reality, so I don't think the writers would work that in," Lively said of the recession, curled on a couch in a Gramercy Park apartment during a break in shooting while cuddling Penny, her copper-colored Maltepoo. Penny wore a tangerine-colored cashmere sweater, one of three given to her by David Lauren. "They created a show that people can watch after a long day and not have to stress and worry and feel the burdens of real life," Lively said. "It's just an escape, watching these sparkly lives and just escaping into this other world for an hour."

Gossip Girl has the ability to make New York appear like Serenadazzling and worldly and optimistic