TV Close-up: Gossip Girl’s Leighton Meester

She’s the character that gives the Blairs of the world a bad name - and I should know. Yes, Gossip Girl has ruined my namesake and it is all Leighton Meester’s fault. Meester plays Blair Waldorf, the perfectly catty teenage ice queen that leads the social scene of Constance Billiard Academy on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. She tears people down. She ruins lives. And then she laughs about it in the bedroom of her multi-million-dollar penthouse apartment. But some say that Blair is the most misunderstood character on television. Look at her past. Her best friend, Serena, left town after having an affair with her boyfriend, Nate. Her father abandoned her in favor of his gay lover and a chateau in the French countryside. And her mother is too busy with half-dressed models to care about the well-being of her formerly bulimic daughter. Misunderstood or not, she is still a menace to high society, and Gossip girls everywhere relish every opportunity they have to watch her in action.