Who Did Criminal Minds’ Jayne Atkinson Play On Gossip Girl? – Looper

Clearly, Atkinson has a talent for playing characters with significant authority; on “Gossip Girl,” she’s the academic dean of Columbia who holds the characters’ fates in her hands throughout her four episodes. With on-again, off-again best friends Serena van der Woodsen (Blake Lively) and Blair Waldorf (Leighton Meester) at war once again, Dean Reuther is often caught in the middle while she’s just trying to, you know, do her job and keep these degenerate 20-year-olds in line.

Between disciplining Serena for being constantly late to class, inexplicably attending Blair’s birthday party (which seems like a weird thing for a dean to do), and receiving faked emails “from” Serena where she appears to offer sexual favors for better grades, Dean Reuther has her work cut out for her at any given moment. She also has to deal with Juliet (Katie Cassidy), whose sole goal in life is to take Serena down, and Vanessa, who does not attend Columbia — leading to one of the season’s funniest moments, where she asks who Vanessa even is. Dean Reuther only sticks around for those four episodes, and from the character’s perspective, it’s easy to imagine that she needed a long sabbatical after dealing with these messy, privileged young adults.