DaveChung.com - A Guy's Blog From Girl World | Gossip Girl Spinoff starring Jenny Humphrey? Producers say “No.”

Despite The Hollywood Reporter reporting that the show’s creators could be eyeing a spinoff starring Jenny Humphrey (Taylor Momsen) to go along with the Gossip Girl series of books, the show’s producers recently told E! News that they were not pursuing a spinoff.

News or non-news of the Gossip Girl spinoff comes just about a week after Rachel Bilson, or The OC’s Summer Roberts, told AOL Movies that there was no movie version of The OC to come, despite longstanding rumors about the show that was Gossip Girl before there was Gossip Girl.

So yes, I do believe that Jenny Humphrey is an interesting enough character on TV, apart from the books, to carry an entertaining TV series. However, despite the fact that the show might be good, the reality is the Gossip Girl is pulling about 2.6 million viewers per week, hardly stellar numbers.

And while people can say that ratings don’t matter, I have a hard time picturing a show, even one with as much buzz as GG, give birth to a spinoff that will have an even younger target audience and lose a good deal of the on-screen sexcapades that make Gossip work. 

Let’s look at another show, Private Practice, that averaged 10.8 million viewers per episode, a respectable number. Practice famously came from Grey’s Anatomy, a show that averages anywhere from 16 million to 20 million viewers per episode. So let’s be really generous say that Private Practice gets 70% of the Grey’s audience week to week.

Take that percentage over to Gossip Girl, and you’ve got an audience of about 1.5 million OMFG viewers per week. And yes, while Gossip continues to dominate on iTunes and a good episode probably garners more buzz that a big episode of The Hills, could anyone justify a 1.5 million viewer show on broadcast television, despite all the good buzz? Why not just put professional wrestling on the air and automatically double your ratings?

While I’d love to see a show starring Taylor Momsen, Gossip Girl is still only getting started, though it feels like it’s been talked about forever, and creating a spinoff would not only be premature, but it would cut the life of the parent show short by taking out one of the show’s most compelling characters.

Dan and Serena all day? Gossip Girl would be donezo.