New York Magazine is the first media outlet to unabashedly declare Gossip Girl one of the best shows ever. Which is funny, because we have been actively avoiding it.

The show is based on a series of books with the same name and we had to go to Wikipedia to learn that it’s about Upper East Side brats: They gossip, do drugs, and drink, but they also deal with sex and relationship problems. These characters attend elite private single-sex schools, where their lives are watched by an unseen character who runs a blog about them, and is always on the lookout for the scoop on everything and everyone.

Jessica Pressler and Chris Rovzar write a weekly blog on NYMag.com and have quietly turned it to one of the Gossip Girl centers on the internet, of which there are increasingly more (unsettling?).

In the cover-story, Jess and Chris give six reasons why we should be watching Gossip Girl:

+ One: Because Gossip Girl Is The Greatest Teen Dramas Of All Time

The one convincing paragraph that actually had us interested:

Take the episode this fall where all of the kids went to a giant masquerade ball. Handsomely dim Nate Archibald (Chace Crawford) is supposed to meet his girlfriend Blair Waldorf (Leighton Meester), the school’s virgin queen of mean, at the Social Event of the Season. But Nate may actually be in love with Blair’s best friend, Serena, whom he had sex with last year on the bar at the Campbell Apartment. While Nate was clearly thrilled by this experience, Serena was ashamed and fled to boarding school in Connecticut. But now she’s back because her brother Eric tried to commit suicide. Anyway, so Blair found out about Nate and Serena and they broke up, but then Nate’s parents pressured him to reunite with her and give her his great-grandmother’s ring (”the one that Cornelius Vanderbilt gave her”). See, Nate’s dad has a huge cocaine problem and is failing massively at work, and he needs to take Blair’s mom’s fashion company public in order to salvage his career. Meanwhile, Serena (Lively) has gone to the ball with a dork from Dalton (his IM handle is Rich Boy IV), but is really in love with Dan (Badgley), the intellectual outsider from Brooklyn, who loves her back with a sincerity heretofore unseen in any real-life teenage boy with unblemished skin. Did we mention that all of this is being narrated by an anonymous teenage blogger (voiced by Kristen Bell) who puts TMZ to shame? Oh, and Dan’s little sister Jenny (Taylor Momsen) has locked Chuck Bass (Ed Westwick), the show’s brooding Draco Malfoy type, on the roof in his underwear, since he once tried to date-rape her, and she’s rushing out of the building when Nate—whoops!—mistakes her for Serena, since they are wearing masks and both have 200 pounds of blonde hair extensions. So Nate kisses Jenny, thinking it’s Serena, and in the end everything is left perilously up in the air.

Um, ok? We know that’s better than The Hills, at least.

+ Two: Because Offscreen, the Drama Continues

This isn’t our fault, per se, but the online gossip community did turn to actual Gossip Girl gossip during the writers’ strike. We didn’t because we wanted to actually cover the strike, but for blogs that do little more than re-caps of TV shows, something needed to be done.

+Three: Because Gossip Girl Is Changing The Very Model Of A Successful TV Show

This is actually a legitimate claim. Part of the reason we and a plethora of other industry media outlets didn’t take Gossip Girl seriously during it’s debut was that the numbers were horrible. Straight up canceling numbers. But that was before Gosiip Girl soared to number one on iTunes episode download service and the CW’s site blew up with people watching online.

Neilson wasn’t ready to deal with Gossip Girl and to this day no one knows how big it is. It’s a legion of DVR, streaming, downloading fans who are still mostly anonymous.

This is bad mojo for CW who will NOT be airing the last 5 episodes of this season online until they have all aired, attempting to force teenagers to clear their schedules for TV melodrama.

+Four: Because of Blake and Leighton

This refers to stars Blake Lively and Leighton Meester who play the blonde bombshell and the bitchy brunette. We don’t care, because we haven’t watched, but we’re all in favor of sassy, hot teens.

+Five: Because There Really May Be A Gossip Girl

This comes from long-standing knowledge that the creators over at CW are making their cast into their characters, or as closely as possible. You won’t see us reporting on Page Six Gossip Girl news, not because they are stupid (they are), but because the CW plants stories to promote their stars.

This is how TV works. All lies.

+Six: Because, Against All Odds, If Offers Profound Social Commentary

This is a pretty good point for New York Magazine. The argument is that by filtering rich-New-York-Kids through the lens of a mostly despicable series of trumped-up plot points, the show can be commenting on the classes and superficial world of New York high-society without appear as a satire in the pure sense of the word (like South Park).

Does all this mean we have to start watching Gossip Girl?

We hope not, but NY Mag isn’t the only ones calling for this show to get more OMFG attention.