CW non-hit Gossip Girl made a rather triumphant post-strike return last night, and everything was different but also sort of the same! Different: Machiavellian Jenny has replaced Blair as Constance Billard's Queen Bee. Chuck has become kind of mellow. Serena and her maybe-gay brother Eric have moved into the Bass residence. The previously mute minorities in Blair's clique have even been given names and speaking roles! What has stayed the same: co-creator Josh Schwartz' steadfast resolution to producing episodes that are self-contained and which have neat, tidy endings, as opposed to letting the drama simmer and build over the course of the season in accordance with the natural order of the teen soap.

Social-climbing freshman Jenny, for example, steals a $15,000 dress from her friend's mom, and then finagles her way back into said friend's good graces that same night, simply by getting Nate to come to dinner at Butter. Really? We couldn't have made her sweat it out for a few weeks and skip some classes and develop a drug habit/eating disorder and do whatever it is angst-y high school misfits do to cope with their problems? (As far as we can tell, Jenny's main "problem" is that her dad is only rich enough to afford a loft in Brooklyn, which is a problem we'd gladly take on.)

Anyway, if the show ever hopes to be as good as New York magazine says it is—and currently it's not, for the aforementioned plot-management issue and the fact that the fictional lives of the GG characters aren't even as glamorous as the "real" lives of The Hills nitwits—it's gonna need a lot more sex and drugs and infidelity and cheating and scandal. Paging Michelle Trachtenberg!