Stations asked not to air ‘Gossip Girl’ episode

NEW YORK (AP) — On-air promos for a sexual threesome on a coming 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, which is being teased in an ad as a “3SOME,” is “reckless and irresponsible,” parents council President Tim Winter said in a statement. The threesome involves three main characters in the show, but they are not identified in the promos.

The council has urged CW affiliate stations not to air the episode, scheduled for Monday.

In a letter to the 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 council 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,” Winters said Wednesday. “Such a claim doesn’t even pass the ‘laugh test.’”

CW spokesman Paul McGuire said the target audience for “Gossip Girl” is 18- to 34-year-old women, with a median viewer age of 27 years old.

The network had no comment on the council’s complaint, he said.

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