The ratings are heating up for Gossip Girl, the teen drama about a gossip blog that follows the kids at a Manhattan prep school, just in time for it to add buzz to the new lineup the struggling CW network rolls out October 5.

With record-breaking audiences so far this season, the once troubled network now has a bona fide hit on its hands—and a solid shot at generating respectable ratings gains across the network.

"Gossip Girl has hit the opposite of a sophomore slump. It's hitting a sophomore rise," says Jason Maltby, president of national broadcast for MindShare, an ad-buying agency. "That's key, because it's now the flag of the network."

This past Monday, the show delivered a series high of 3.7 million viewers, topping the previous record for the season two premiere on Labor Day. And this week, thanks to a strong lead-in from Gossip Girl, the aging One Tree Hill—currently in its sixth season on the air—delivered its best performance in the CW's target demographic in almost two years.

Overall, the network won the night in women 18 to 34, adults 18 to 34, and women 18 to 49, and had the best Monday in its history.

90210, another high-profile gamble for the CW, delivered the network's best-ever Tuesday when it premiered on September 2. Despite viewer fall-off from the first episode, 90210 grew its target demographics and audience size between episodes two and three, which aired last night to 3.3 million viewers.

"If the CW's core strategy is to provide an alternative broadcast network for younger females—and its pitch is that it delivers to that underserved segment—it's gotta be pretty happy," says Maltby, who credits Gossip Girl with a positive "ripple effect" across the CW's programming slate.

The CW is no doubt hoping those ripples turn into waves by Sunday, October 5, when the network premieres its all-new Sunday night: four new shows across five hours, developed by Media Rights Capital, an entertainment finance company based in New York and Los Angeles.  

It's all a far cry from last year, when the CW, founded in 2006, was plagued with problems. There was the scuffle over the decision to get rid of Friday night's ratings smash SmackDown, part of an effort to streamline the CW's appeal to young women—a group far more likely to watch Serena and Blair duking it out on 5th Avenue than sweaty men doing the same on a wrestling mat.

More important, the network failed to develop a hit show, despite the huge promotional muscle thrown behind Gossip Girl, which performed anemically in its first season. The show averaged an audience of about 2 million, never mustering more than 2.6 million fans for a show—and even that was only for the series premiere.

Then, in an ill-advised gambit meant to gin up more viewers, the CW decided to stop running episodes of the show online. Predictably, instead of invigorating fans, it just pissed them off.

Now, the network appears to be on safer footing than at any point since its founding two years ago, using the building blocks of one successful show to help promote another. Teasers for Privileged, another of the network's new fall offerings, were woven into the 90210 premiere, and last summer CW entertainment president Dawn Ostroff said that the Sunday night shows would be heavily promoted throughout the rest of the week's lineup.

"At the very least what they had to do this season was reverse those huge slides that they took last year," says David Scardino, a TV programming analyst for R.P.A., an advertising agency in Santa Monica, California. Between the network's first and second seasons, ratings were down throughout the week and off by as much as 50% on Sunday nights, a "total disaster," says Scardino.

Now, although he approves of the network's Monday through Thursday night lineups, Scardino says he is disappointed that Fridays at 9 p.m. are just repeats of America's Next Top Model. And he believes that a successful Sunday is key to the CW's continued success.

The promotional campaign for the all-new Sunday night has already begun. Scardino likes the chances of the show slotted in at 8 p.m., Valentine best—it's especially female-friendly, and going up against Sunday night's testosterone-laden menu of football and Fox cartoon shows, could perform well.

"That seemed on paper like it had the best shot at hanging around," says Scardino. With a little help from Gossip Girl, its chances just got a lot better.