There is evil in the world. That shouldn’t be a shocker to any of you. According to the world of “Gossip Girl,” however, the world runs on such evil. The characters on this show and the contrived narratives they reflect would be great examples in Robert Sapolsky’s Human Behavioral Biology lecture. Yes, they are that absurd.

To me, it is ironic that a show called “Gossip Girl” fails so horribly to critique or even accurately capture social norms. Perhaps this season’s shift of setting from high school to college has scrambled any sense of loyalty to the original books and the title (because no one ever gossips in college. We’re so above that, she said parenthetically). The community of “Gossip Girl” is so disparate that you can’t even really divide them into cutesie teams like “Team Big Ho” and “Team Little J.” What “Gossip Girl” does trade in surprisingly well are interpersonal romantic relationships.

This struck me when I actually enjoyed the recent episode, “Dr. Estrangedlove.” (How great are those titles, by the way?) Blair flirts with a Columbia hottie at a Brooklyn party only to experience a genuine emotion: a sense of loss and wistfulness for her recently dashed love affair with Chuck Bass. As she declares in a refreshingly gentle tone, “I suddenly realized that the way to get over you isn’t by hooking up with some random guy, or pretending like we didn’t happen. You and I loved each other. And then you broke my heart. I’m doing everything possible not to face that fact,” I was moved by and alerted to my attachment to the couple. Referring back to Human Behavioral Biology, I would say that Chuck and Blair are like an enzyme and its substrate: the enzyme has a specific shape that matches to one substrate and allows it to fit. This is the main tension of the show in that the audience has an opinion of who fits with whom. They either pledge allegiance to the seemingly arbitrary whims of the show’s writers or think that they know better. This investment in the show explains why the parental figures are so inherently dull–because they are married and stuck in their pairings, or because we don’t think old people are capable of love. It’s probably a little bit of both.

In the same vein, the constant reshuffling of couples in “Gossip Girl” frustrates viewers most because we care about the romantic pairings most. “Gossip Girl” has, arguably, cast its relationships as products of psychology and the past. For example, Rufus and Lily love each other because they associate each other with happier, simpler youths; Serena and Nate love each other because they popped each other’s cherries; Blair and Chuck love each other because they both come from broken homes. Human Behavioral Biology can explain why Dan and Vanessa are such a perversion of love: pseudo-kinship, the idea that you learn to identify those you were raised alongside as relatives and therefore have no desire to mate with any of them. The disregard with which the writers of this show throw couples together in one-night-stands directly contradicts the protracted artifice of courtship and trial-and-error established in the first season.

One critique of my logic here is the critique of “‘shippers,” television viewers who invest in a show only for the inevitable romantic relationships. The most prominent example in recent television memory lies in the viewers of NBC’s “Chuck,” computer science nerds who are convinced that the show only fulfills their fantasy when nerdy Chuck and hottie Sarah get together. In February, when the characters of Chuck and Sarah dated other people, these bloggers threatened to boycott the show. The couple reconciled within a few episodes–not because they reacted to these drama queens, but because they knew what they were doing. This event represented another failure of the serial form in an uneducated public. To a certain extent, “Gossip Girl” viewers have to be ‘shippers since, as we have established, relationships and clothes are the only good parts of the show. We also have a right to be ‘shippers because the writers of “Gossip Girl” are not nearly as evolved or thoughtful as the writers of “Chuck” (although both were created by the same man, Josh Schwartz…).

I find it oddly comforting that the trashiest of TV gets the most important of human emotions right. The actions that correlate to those emotions on “Gossip Girl” belong more traditionally to soap operas than primetime…but I guess those lines were blurred long ago. As Sapolsky would say, the failures of categorization. Or in this case, the benefits.