Gossip Girl cast members Jessica Szohr, Penn Badgley, Blake Lively, Chace Crawford, Ed Westwick, Leighton Meester, and Taylor Momsen, photographed by Mark Seliger in Coney Island for V.F.'s August 2008 issue.

If every generation has its one or two shows that prove defining, that essentially everyone seemed to watch at the time as if there were no other choice in the matter, Gossip Girl would be it for anyone who was a teenager or twenty-something (or, in many cases, older than that) when it first aired. The series—which is celebrating the 10th anniversary of its premiere this month—debuted before Instagram or Snapchat had launched, and before Facebook and Twitter had become the juggernaut forces they are today. But the premise of the series—an anonymous blogger, who goes by "Gossip Girl," monitors the goings-on of a small group of glamorous Upper East Side high-schoolers—predicted, to an almost eerie extent, what was to come for our culture. Kristen Bell, who voiced "Gossip Girl" on the show, says of creators Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, "They were spearheading: What if the Internet is just a place to judge people? What if that's what it turns into? And they turned out to be Nostradamus."

And on a meta level, the stars of the show were among the last wave of young television stars who were not broadcasting their every move on social media—which perhaps helped to create a certain air of mystery and intrigue about them, one that doesn't exist in the same way for young television stars now. Blake Lively, who starred as Serena van der Woodsen, says she knew immediately upon reading the pilot that it was going to change the trajectory of her career.

"I remember saying when I read this script, 'Whoever does this will not be able to walk out of their house ever again and be the same as before they started this.' You could tell it was a cultural phenomenon. That was both exciting and thrilling, but also very scary."