With an empty martini glass at her elbow, teenager Serena van der Woodsen, star of The CW's "Gossip Girl," leans against the tony Manhattan bar and blithely downs another vodka concoction, unscathed.

It's no surprise the frothy series about the sexy lifestyle of Upper East Side prepsters has some parents and reviewers in an uproar over its glamorized glimpse of underage drinking.

But the truth is, though American youths may not knock back limoncello and champagne as blithely as couture-clad Serena, TV shows such as "Gossip Girl" offer a fairly accurate depiction of teen partying across the country.

According to the U.S. surgeon general's office, underage consumption of beer and alcohol accounts for a quarter of alcohol sales.

The truth is also that many parents are in denial.

Parents think, "Oh, not my wonderful children," said Orinda parenting expert Ksenija Soster Olmer. "They pretend it's not happening, that it couldn't happen to their family."

But according to the 2005 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, it is happening — to 11 million people ages 12 to 20.

Although the overall percentage of drinkers has held fairly steady for the past five years, the most recent statistics from that survey show teens have begun drinking at younger ages, and binge drinking has surged — nearly 7.2 million teens reporting they sometimes down five or more alcoholic beverages in a single sitting.

It's "an epidemic of underage drinking that germinates in elementary and middle school with 9- to 13-year-olds and erupts on college campuses, where 44 percent of students binge drink," said Columbia University's Joseph Califano Jr., who heads the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse.

Nearly 27 percent of Hawai'i people ages 12 to 20 had an alcoholic drink within a 30-day period surveyed, according to the latest national statistics. And 19.53 percent binged — drank five or more drinks at one time.

Blaming "Gossip Girl" and its booze-without-consequences message misses the point, said Ellen Peterson of the Acalanes Drug and Alcohol Task Force, a 12-year-old advocacy group in California. The lack of televised consequences doesn't carry much impact in a culture where unsupervised teen partying is an every-weekend occurrence.

"When teens drink, they don't think about the consequences," the Diablo Valley (Calif.) College psychology professor said. "They drink to have fun, to make talking easier, to lose inhibitions."

Teens focus on the here and now, Denman said, not grim prospects down the road.

And those prospects are not just the threat of a hangover or puking in the lap of a crush, say adolescent health experts, it's the dramatic effect alcohol has on risky sexual activity, physical assault and teen drunken-driving.

Now, recent research has tied early drinking to adult alcoholism. A teen who begins drinking before age 15 is four times more likely to develop alcohol dependency as an adult.

Parents are a critical piece when it comes to addressing the issue. But they're also part of the problem, Califano said. According to a 2006 study produced by Califano's department, 99 percent of parents said they would never serve alcohol to minors. But 28 percent of partygoing teens said parents had chaperoned their booze-soaked parties.

Ten percent of Bay Area parents with kids ages 14 to 17 mentioned alcohol when pollsters for a 2006 Lucile Packard Foundation study asked what concerns they had for their children.

Too many parents are either naive or delusional — or they're buying the keg so they can "supervise" the drinking, said Olmer. Add in the secrecy and frequency of unsupervised parties and the time constraints of curfews and you have a recipe for disaster.

"Even the best kids make stupid decisions," Olmer said. "The circumstances are conducive to being drunk. It's not an excuse, but I see how it leads to their doing that. They're knocking them down to get drunk as fast as possible."

The solution has to come from not just one home, Olmer said, but all of them.

What's needed is a new approach, said Berkeley's Norman Constantin, program director of the Public Health Institute's Center for Research on Adolescent Health and Development.

The U.S. is one of four countries — along with Egypt, Oman and Qatar — that prohibit alcohol for anyone younger than 21.

"Our drinking age of 21 eliminates the opportunity for parents to legally teach safe drinking to their teens. ... Most teens would benefit from being taught how to (abstain), along with how to drink safely and moderately when and if they do drink," Constantin said. "Both skills are critically important."

In the meantime, Olmer said, parents need to model appropriate behavior, set firm limits and have those difficult conversations with their teens.