Here’s the scoop: Thanks to shows like “Gossip Girl,” New York City had its biggest year ever on the small screen in 2011.
And with “Gossip Girl” set to air its 100th episode this Monday, Mayor Bloomberg had an excuse to visit the set Wednesday — and get his picture taken with it’s sexy stars, Blake Lively, Kelly Rutherford and Kaylee DeFer.
“I don’t get to do this every day,” a beaming Bloomberg said on a stage at Silvercup Studios in Long Island City.
It also gave hizzoner a chance to crow about his administration’s efforts to turn the Big Apple into Hollywood East.
“New York City is a television town,” he said.
It’s also a town that’s hard to fake.
“Gossip Girl” executive producer Stephanie Savage said she had to fight her higher-ups to shoot the show in New York.
“We were quickly told it would be too expensive, too complicated,” she said.
Savage said she went into overdrive when she was shown a patch of green in a Los Angeles sound studio and told it could stand in for Central Park.
“It became our mission: New York, or bust,” she said. “We are honored to shoot in the city.”
Bloomberg, who prefers reading spy novels to watching TV, admitted he doesn’t watch “Gossip Girl,” which revolves around a group of privilege teens in his neighborhood — the Upper East Side.
But Bloomberg mostly stuck to his lines, reading a proclamation in which he declared himself totally interested “in finding out who the real Gossip Girl is. Serena’s cousin, maybe?”
That made some members of the cast smile.
“Gossip Girl” is just one of 23 TV series that were shot in the city last year.
A decade ago, just nine TV shows could carry the label “Made in New York.”
And there’s lots of money in TV.
Over the past five years, some $200 million was spent on local development just to produce “Gossip Girl,” a show that has provided a livelihood to 6,300 people working both in front of the cameras and behind the scenes, city officials said.
Last year, the popular show about the scandals of wealthy New Yorkers in Bloomberg’s neighborhood — the upper East Side — employed 180 crew members, 120 principal actors and uses 500 local vendors, they said.
The 100th “Gossip Girl” episode airs this Monday on the CW station.
csiemaszko@nydailynews.com
