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NEW YORK – On-air promos for a sexual threesome on an upcoming episode of “Gossip Girl” have spurred the Parents Television Council to ask affiliates of The CW network to pre-empt the show.
Airing the teen tryst, being teased in an ad as a “3SOME,” is “reckless and irresponsible,” PTC president Tim Winter said in a statement Wednesday. The threesome involves three main characters in the show, but they are not identified in the promos.
The PTC has urged CW affiliate stations not to air the episode, set for Monday.
In a letter to affiliates, Winter asked: “Will you now be complicit in establishing a precedent and expectation that teenagers should engage in behaviors heretofore associated primarily with adult films?”
This is not the first time the PTC has complained about the sexy prep-school soap, which Winter said is “expressly targeted to impressionable teenagers.”
In July 2008, the organization spoke out against a racy marketing campaign for its new season. Ads showed intimate moments between the show’s characters (on a couch, in the sack or apparently skinny-dipping), accompanied by headlines like “A Nasty Piece of Work” and “Mind-Blowingly Inappropriate.”
“CW has been defending graphic content on ‘Gossip Girl’ by asserting that they don’t target teenagers,” Winter said. “Such a claim doesn’t even pass the ‘laugh test.’ ”
CW spokesman Paul McGuire said the target audience for “Gossip Girl” – which has made stars of Blake Lively and Chace Crawford – is 18- to 34-year-old women, with a median viewer age of 27 years. The network had no comment on PTC’s complaint, he said.
