I don't know whether it was a commentary on my taste or just some mysterious electronic dietetic deficiency, but last fall my TiVo turned voraciously cannibal on the prep-school soap Gossip Girl, devouring half a dozen episodes without leaving behind so much as a teenage bone. I hoped to catch up through reruns, but it didn't work out, and now Monday's debut of Gossip Girl's third season is almost upon us. So I committed a desperate act: I watched the second season on DVD.

Season DVDs, I've always thought, are a good way to ruin your favorite TV shows. Episodes aren't written or shot to be watched three or four at a time, and it's a rare show that doesn't start to look repetitive or formulaic when watched that way. That goes double for soaps, which really are repetitive and formulaic, even when they're good.

I don't know whether Gossip Girl: The Complete Second Season (Warner Home Video, $59.98) proves that I've been wrong about television DVDs, or just that Gossip Girl is a stronger show than I thought -- perhaps a little of both -- but I watched the whole 25-episode season in five days, and my only regret was that there wasn't a 26th.

I'm about 40 years and one Y chromosome away from Gossip Girl's target demographic, but I've loved watching these social butterflies at a prep school in Manhattan's Upper East Side pull one another's wings off ever since the show's debut in 2007. Executive producer Josh Schwartz is an expert at taking predictable genres -- the teen soap, in Gossip Girl and The O.C., and the action adventure, in Chuck -- peopled with characters so layered and nuanced, speaking dialogue so smart, that you forget you've seen the story 10,000 times before.

Gossip Girl's second season showcases Schwartz's skills like never before. The second season is essentially a repetition of the first: The commissarette of the school's Stalinist social order realizes that there's more to life than sending somebody off to Cotillion Siberia for wearing the wrong shoes. The only difference is that this time around the existential meltdown occurs not in the drunken, promiscuous Serena (Blake Lively) but her successor, the icy, vengeful Blair. (``Google revenge and you get BlairWaldorf.com,'' shudders one of her fearful minions.)

Despite its familiarity, the season's story still seems brand new. Much of the credit for that should go to Leighton Meester. While Lively still gets top billing, Meester's performance as Blair, whose shallow social obsessions mask a keen intelligence that's slowly gaining the upper hand, makes her the real star of Gossip Girl's second season. Half her dialogue, I suspect, whizzes right over the heads of much of the show's audience. For instance, her reaction to the news that Serena's smitten by a young artist who swears she's his muse: ``A guy starts out in his blue period and everything's great. But it's only a matter of time before he's all into cubism and it's all some other girl's eye coming out of her forehead.''

By the way, among the DVD's extras -- they include some webisodes featuring Blair's canny Polish maid, featurettes on Gossip Girl fashions and locations, and a gag reel -- is an audio edition of the latest book by Cecily von Ziegesar, author of the series of novels on which the series is based. You know how readers are always moaning that books get ruined by TV or movies? This time, not so much.

• The third season of Gossip Girl premieres at 9 p.m. Monday on WSFL-CW 39.

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