Out of the mouths of babes

Rich or poor, the voice of youth is curiously consistent, says Stephanie Savage, the executive producer and co-writer of US drama Gossip Girl.

"Young people have a kind of situational narcissism," Savage says. "They feel that what they're going through has never happened to anyone before in the history of the world and no one can understand them, especially older people.

"That's actually a lot of fun to write because you can have very flawed characters that you're still cheering for because they're young and you hope they work it out."

Well, there's flawed and there's flawed. Take Blair Waldorf (Leighton Meester), whose father left her mother for a male model. Or Nate Archibald (Chace Crawford), Blair's boyfriend, who slept with her best friend Serena van der Woodsen (Blake Lively) before she left abruptly for boarding school. Or Chuck Bass (Ed Westwick), Nate's morally bankrupt best friend whose roving eye has landed on Blair.

The names and plot twists may be soaked in satire but the teen angst is played straight. Narrating their byzantine private lives is the unseen Gossip Girl (voiced by Kristen Bell), a blogger who dishes up their secrets for public digestion. Which of Blair and Serena's inner circle is the author remains the show's enduring mystery.

The series, based on Cecily von Ziegesar's novels of the same name, has replaced The OC as the youth soap of choice. It premiered in Australia on cable channel FOX8 last summer. This week, Channel Nine launches the first season on free-to-air, with FOX8 about to launch the second.

Two characters provide an alternative window into the sometimes surreal world of rich New York teenagers - Dan Humphrey (Penn Badgley) and his sister Jenny (Taylor Momsen), whose rock star father has become an art gallery owner.

"We felt it was important to see the world through the eyes of someone who wasn't a part of it," Savage says.

"With Jenny, you have a character who, in the first season at least, very much wanted to be a part of it and was struggling to figure out how to get that done, and in Dan, someone who was much more critical and ambivalent about it. It was nice to have those two different points of view."

New York Magazine declared the series "the greatest show ever", which elicits a chuckle from its producer. "We try not to be too swayed by anything we read. As they say: 'Praise and blame, let them be the same.' At the same time, it's more exciting to be written about than it is necessarily to get giant ratings because you want to feel that you matter on the cultural landscape."