'Gossip Girl' behind tinted windows

"GREY'S Anatomy" has the elevator. "The Real World" has the confessional room. And "Gossip Girl" has the limousine. They are places where characters unburden themselves, out of the view of others. And because they're not being watched, they sometimes behave as they otherwise might not; remove becomes a sort of enabler.

Earlier this season, Blair Waldorf (Leighton Meester) famously surrendered to the advances of grade-A cad Chuck Bass (Ed Westwick) in the back of a limo. Last week, Lily van der Woodsen (Kelly Rutherford) used hers as a mobile therapy space with both her daughter, Serena (Blake Lively), and her former boyfriend, Rufus Humphrey (Matthew Settle).

The limousine is a tantalizingly private space on a show in which so much happens in public, either on the actual streets of New York or disseminated via the Gossip Girl blog. But there's just one thing: Only rich people have limos.

"Gossip Girl" (CW, Mondays at 8 p.m.) has spent most of the season experimenting with class miscegenation: Serena slumming it with boyfriend Dan Humphrey (Penn Badgley), and Dan's sister Jenny (Taylor Momsen) trying desperately to climb the social ladder of the Upper East Side, where she and Dan attend school. The person who knows Blair the most intimately, who aids and abets her even when she's doing wrong, is her maid Dorota (Zuzanna Szadkowski).

But the recent, post-writers strike episodes have been, gleefully, beginning to reinforce the wall between the haves and have-nots. After Blair was dethroned from her spot atop the social ladder after her dalliances with Chuck and Nate Archibald (Chace Crawford), Jenny took the train in from Brooklyn to fill her Louboutins. (Costume design, by Eric Daman, is spectacular, such as Chuck's fluorescent trench coats and Jenny's high-end DIY dresses; like Patricia Field's work on "Sex and the City," to which Daman also contributed, it is a hypertrophied version of New York that speaks as loudly as any character.)

Short-lived era

JENNY also inherited a gift for bitchiness and a gaggle of minions -- the new girls, Elise (Emma DeMar) and Hazel (Dreama Walker), are physically small, and their faces are packed disturbingly thick with makeup, in the manner of child pageant contestants. They too have grown up too soon.