It’s worth asking how to judge the revival of a teen show whose flaws were baked into its appeal. The original Gossip Girl, the high-society soap about Upper East Side teens that ran on the CW from 2007 until 2012, based on the books by Cecily von Ziegesar, was often ludicrous, poorly acted and gloriously mean. It was also beloved, both during its time and in its years on streaming services, for its completely absorbing portrait of the ultra-rich – a glamorous, Recession-era fantasy in which everyone hooks up with everyone in a popularity war mediated by an anonymous blogger. No one would argue that it was prestige television, but many millennials regard the show that launched the careers of Blake Lively, Leighton Meester, Penn Badgley and others as foundational.
HBO Max’s new Gossip Girl is less a reboot than a spiritual successor of the original show. The series, created by Joshua Safran, a writer and executive producer of its predecessor, and executive produced by its original creators, Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, returns to Constance Billard, the preppy Upper East Side school, with a new cast of ruthless Gen Z students. The original characters are unknown to this new cast, though new Gossip Girl shares many of the same beats as its predecessor: a central clique, popular music six months off its peak, inventive variations of the same plaid uniform, location shots around the city, celebrity cameos, the Met steps, Kristen Bell as the voice of Gossip Girl.
It also updates the original’s most overt problem: the new Gossip Girl is racially diverse, with two black women in the lead roles, queer and sexually fluid. Still, even with the should-be-standard changes, the new Gossip Girl falls into a weird limbo – an ode to a teen era barely past, updated for an audience that probably prefers TikToks to privilege porn, whose copious pop culture references wink mostly to viewers in their late 20s or 30s. It’s a middling, frustrating if bingeable homage, too guarded an IP property to have the (albeit disingenuous) ambition of HBO Max’s Generation nor the grit of HBO’s Euphoria, a genuine hit with real teenagers.
In this 2021 iteration, set at the return to in-person school from the pandemic, the queen bee is junior Julien Calloway (Jordan Alexander), an Instagram celebrity accompanied by two henchmen/social media managers, Monet (Savannah Lee Smith) and Luna (Zíon Moreno), who do little other than scheme in the four episodes made available to critics. Her perch is threatened by the arrival of her long-lost half-sister, Zoya (Whitney Peak), a naive freshman on scholarship. Julien and Zoya share a picture of their late mother, overprotective single fathers, and by the demands of the show, can’t just be friends. The rest of the clique barely scrambles the roles of the original; Julien’s boyfriend, Obie (Eli Brown), is a Dan Humphrey do-gooder but with money (and an eerily similar voice), the kind of privilege hypocrite who hands donuts out to a strike line at his parents’ development. Max Wolfe (High Fidelity’s Thomas Doherty) is Chuck Bass but pansexual and less caddish, lupine and especially invested in spicing up the chilly monogamy of his best friends, Aki (Evan Mock) and Audrey (Emily Alyn Lind).
There’s a fair share of parental drama (divorce, cheating, being grounded) but new Gossip Girl spends considerably more energy than the original on the teachers of Constance Billard, led by Kate (Tavi Gevinson, another nod to the New York intelligentsia), who worry their entitled students have grown too emboldened. To go light on specifics: the 404-not found Gossip Girl blog of yore, whose author was a mystery until the original’s final episode, returns in the pilot as an anonymous Instagram account (a la deuxmoi). The creators are not a mystery, and the motive – an experiment on fear of social surveillance and a ham-fisted war on privilege – spoils quickly into something unjustifiable, the least absorbing part of the show that I found impossible to root for.
The mystery is not who is Gossip Girl, but what havoc the account can wreak. Pitted against each other, Julien and Zoya snipe at typically chic Gossip Girl locales – Dumbo house, fashion week, a Jeremy O Harris play (with a Harris cameo). Alexander and Peak, both relatively unknown Canadian actors, are compelling amid a sea of Instagram-attractive actors but struggle to navigate the scripts’ demands to toggle between heartfelt bonding and unforgivable, backstabbing cruelty in an evening. Attempts to shoehorn in more progressive politics, such as Zoya telling an old Broadway producer to expand beyond white shows with white actors, land awkwardly; optics-driven wokeness is probably accurate to the milieu of Constance Billard, but the show doesn’t seem smart enough to be making that commentary.
That being said, the only real requirement for a show like Gossip Girl is that it is watchable. By that measure, the new Gossip Girl stumbles, but hot drama is hot drama. To quote one anonymous blogger, you know you love it, though a clumsy homage straining for relevance isn’t likely to court a new generation of devotees.
Gossip Girl will be available on HBO Max on Thursdays from now on and will be on BBC iPlayer in the UK later this year