ON the pilot episode of “Gossip Girl,” the new prime-time soap opera about teenagers at an Upper East Side private school, a raven-haired student named Blair Waldorf put the moves on her boyfriend at a party, pushing him down on a bed upstairs while a waiter pushes canapés on her mother’s guests below.

“That would never happen in our grade, but if you were a senior, it might,” said Brooke Yalof, 12, who played host to an informal panel of seventh graders convened to view the pilot at the request of The New York Times. But Simone Rivera, 13, Ms. Yalof’s classmate at Spence, the Bergdorf Goodman of Upper East Side private schools, was not so sure. “At least I’d lock the door,” she said with a laugh to signal that she was speaking hypothetically, of course.

Sprawled in front of the flat-screen television at the Yalofs’ uptown duplex, the girls analyzed the action over pizza and pretzels, their conversation punctuated by the trilling of cellphones, and the occasional giggle. Saucy beyond their years, and disinclined to censor themselves, they were not quite the audience envisioned by the producers of “Gossip Girl,” which is adapted from a series of best-selling young-adult novels by Cecily von Ziegesar, and which is aimed primarily at 18- to 34-year-olds.

But when the show has its premiere on Wednesday night on the CW Network, these girls say they will be watching. In the view of many teenagers who live the cosseted lives that the program tries to replicate, “Gossip Girl” is more than an escapist romp or overwrought melodrama. It holds up a fairly accurate, if somewhat distorting mirror to their existence.