When its strike-lengthened spring break finally finished last week, Upper East Side soap Gossip Girl returned to prep school amidst a media frenzy over its pop-cultural phenom status — parental watchdog groups fumed over the sexy OMFG ad campaign, gossip sites outed a gay character (and alleged the same of star Chace Crawford), Vanity Fair interviewed the costume designers and New York magazine boldly slapped “Best. Show. Ever.” across its cover.

That first new episode, “The Blair Bitch Project,” was a corker. There was the epic catfight between Blair Waldorf (Leighton Meester) and social-climbing Brooklynite Jenny (Taylor Momsen) as well as porn-and-cocaine-laden foreshadowing for the show’s newest mean girl Georgina (Buffy sis Michelle Trachtenberg) plus a chance to sympathize with the show’s nastiest, nattiest character, the ever-awesome antihero Chuck Bass (Ed Westwick).

It was one of the series’ best eps, seemingly evidence Gossip Girl had found its stride and, like middle-of-first-season Heroes, was stepping up to justify its “It” status.

The next morning, though, the ratings clocked in at just 2.4 million. For perspective, that week American Idol hit a five-year low at 24 million and fellow freshman show New Amsterdam faces likely cancellation after concluding its season with 10 million.

So why is GG still on the air? Consider it a canary in a coal mine. See, there is a revolution going on — but it will not be televised.

Hand-wringing over PVR time-shifting, online streaming, iTunes sales and BitTorrent downloads isn’t new, but Gossip Girl is the first show where these chickens are already roosting. It skews towards the text-savvy — it’s about a blog, fer crissakes — and its next-gen viewers are way too technologically fluent to be tied to any network sked.

The CW should be raking in money for all the fashionista product placements and sussing out how else to monetize this internet-popular series, but for now networks still make their money by selling ads on, y’know, television. So it hedged its bets by kyboshing its own website’s free online streams. (CTV, no longer broadcasting GG, will soon start streaming episodes online).

Yet fans need not freak. Multiplatform equals TV’s future, so this (traditional) ratings failure won’t be axed anytime soon — execs don’t want to wind up acronym-cursing for prematurely popping GG’s trial balloon.

GOSSIP GIRL AIRS MONDAYS, 9PM ON CW.

Byte-sized snack
Showcase’s new hipster comedy Hot Snack Radio avoids airwaves altogether.
The 13-part series, created by local Matt Eastman, is set in an internet station where a trio of “indie-rock nerds” — pathetic rock journo Gavin (Tim Beresford), ironically mustachioed “bad boy” Nico (Mike Balazo) and legitimately cool webmaster John C (James Cade, who shines with almost no dialogue) — run the titular radio show named for its samosa-selling sponsor Mahatma Jim. Hipster hottie Sam (Joanie Wolkoff) rounds out the cast as a web DJ and the unhappy object of their ham-handed affections.

True to its radio theme, Hot Snack features hot tunes from the likes of Plants and Animals, Miracle Fortress, Tusk, Uncut and MC More or Les, who appears as Southern rapper Shoxxx.
Hot Snack’s loosely strung together webisodes — involving studio parties, wall-socket sex, a ball-grabbing granny, homoerotic reiki and a “Rhythm & Blues orthopedist” — leave you hungry for more.

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