Party Of Five: The Original Gossip Girl?

Slowly making my way through the entirety of "Party Of Five" and nearing the end, broadcast in the fall of 1999, and what do I come across? The freakin' original plot of Gossip Girl! Well, sort of. The show is taking place in the very early days of blogs (I can't recall if they had officially been coined 'blogs' yet) and the show takes place not among rich New York teens but average San Francisco teens.

The storyline is really just a subplot in an episode more famously known as Jennifer Love Hewitt's last episode and a lead-in to her very short lived, very unsuccesful spin-off, "Time Of Your Life". I'll bet ya $10 "Gossip Girl" writer Cecily von Ziegesar was tuned in that evening.

The episode, "Bye Bye Love", was broadcast a mere three years before the first Gossip Girl book was published.

What happens is, Claudia breaks up with her boyfriend an episode or two before and subsequently becomes one of "the cool kids" after her ex serenades the entire school with an amp and guitar in hopes of winning her back. The queen of the "it" crowd latches on to Claudia after realizing they've both been cheated on and Julia was strong enough to dump her loser boyfriend and she was not.

Things are going great with Claudia and the cool kids until someone prints out nasty blog entries about each of the group and brings them to lunch. Claudia, the brains of the group quickly figures out who the original GG may be and confronts them in gym class. The blogger then frames Claudia and she's ostracized!

I'm not gonna give you the whole story. You should check it out yourself. The episode can be found on Youtube in three parts if you want. Here's part two with the beginning of the GG-like subplot.