It’s a new dawn on the Upper East Side, and Gen-Z has taken over the steps of the Met. Gossip Girl is one of those stories that can be rebooted whenever technology gives a leap forward and, as you probably know, social media and the way we use our cellphones have changed a lot since the original show ended in 2013. So, when HBO Max announced it was bringing it back for another run, it wasn’t much of a surprise.
Of course, everyone who watched the original GG and somehow made it through some of the worst plots and subplots in TV history (looking at you, Season 6) took the news with a grain of salt. After all, as interesting as it would be to check out how Gossip Girl operated in the Instagram/TikTok era, a lot of us really didn’t miss diving back into all that Serena-Chuck-Blair drama.
This is why, four episodes in, it’s great to see that the new Gossip Girl kept elements that helped make the original show fun to watch (e.g. Kristen Bell narration, amazing costume design, great soundtrack) and had no problem improving on many of the issues that made the show fall flat before.
1. A More Diverse Cast
White people problems. The original Gossip Girl was that by its very definition. During most of its run, the writers forgot that the audience couldn’t relate to several problems of the wealthy 1%, and kept some other, more relatable issues at surface level at best. In Season 1, for example, Dan (Penn Badgley) and Jenny Humphrey (Taylor Momsen) were supposed to be outsiders looking in, AKA us viewers. But it didn’t take long for them to blend in so heavily they ended up becoming variations of Serena (Blake Lively), Blair (Leighton Meester), Chuck (Ed Westwick) and Nate (Chace Crawford) with problems that mostly boiled down to fleeting relationships and expensive parties.
Also, Vanessa (Jessica Szohr), the only POC in the main cast, had (to no one’s surprise) an astounding number of zero compelling storylines and ended up fading into the background, to the point of pissing off the novel series writer Cecily von Ziegesar.
The new Gossip Girl, however, is not interested in only parading straight white people around. The protagonist Julien (Jordan Alexander) is a Black girl with a shaved head, which curiously is the same description of Vanessa in the books. Her half-sister Zoya (Whitney Peak) is also a Black girl but with a different background altogether. We also have Aki (Evan Mock) in the main cast, straight from “the kingdom of Hawai’i,” as the actor himself puts it.
This means that the new Gossip Girl has more diversity in one episode than the entire original show’s episodes combined — and we’re not even mentioning sexual orientation, but we’ll get to that.
2. Sexuality
Back in 2009, The CW made a big fuss about the Season 3 Episode, “Enough About Eve.” Fans of the novel series were excited about this one, because Chuck was supposed to be bisexual, but it took the show 49 episodes to give a nod to that. And considering how it played out, it was better to leave it off.
The truth is, the original series always advertised itself as bold and daring, but it barely scratched the surface on this matter, especially considering the target audience were teens and young adults. The only gay character closer to the main cast was Eric (Connor Paolo), who was gone for more than half the show’s run and… that’s a wrap on sexual orientation! The original Gossip Girl only got as far as the “B” in LGBTQIA+, and that is only if you count its misrepresentation of bisexuality.
Once again, the new Gossip Girl outpaces the original, with characters that are openly bisexual and not conflicted at all about it, a hint (so far) at a polyamorous relationship, and the start of a touching storyline of a fully grown person who is starting to come to terms with their non-binary identity. We’re still short on transgender characters, though.
3. Recreational Drug Use & Profanity
As laughable as it seems now, 2007’s Gossip Girl attempted to mimic Skins, a British series that featured characters who were heavy on teenage-ing: they got drunk, smoked marijuana, had sex, cursed a lot, and looked cool while doing it – and that’s only in the first episode. The TV teens of the WB's New York, however, hardly pushed any envelopes.
Of course, we don’t normally expect a prime-time TV series to defy broadcast network standards and practices, but this didn’t stop other teen TV shows that came before from featuring some, if not all of those topics, sometimes in a pretty serious manner. Just to give one example, The O.C., which was created by the same team of showrunners from Gossip Girl (Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage), tackled the issue of substance abuse by having a main character suffer through it — and its consequences — during half its run.
Airing on the censor-less HBO Max, the new Gossip Girl is no holds barred and that’s for the best — not that we are eager to see teenagers doing cocaine and flipping their parents off, but it’s not realistic to have a show about rich, entitled kids who do none of that.
4. Understanding Social Media
Back in 2007, Gossip Girl had a blog. A blog. So, on top of being a major whistleblower, she also had to know basic HTML, and everyone had to read the scandalous tea on the tiny screens of their flip phones. Needless to say, this sounds like forever ago. With social media being an ever-changing entity, the new Gossip Girl now has an Instagram account, which already sounds old for Gen-Z TikTokers.
Nevertheless, we are way more obsessed with social media now than we were in 2007, and it’s not hard to buy that an anonymous account would get traction and blow up like Deuxmoi overnight. Gossip Girl is social media and definitely belongs in Instagram, with the type of features (stories, reels, tagging) that 100 percent serve her purpose.
5. GG’s Identity Is Not Important
As bad as Gossip Girl got in its later seasons, no one could have imagined how bad it would mess up the reveal of who the title character GG was. In a “twist” that should be put in the Guinness World of Records under Most Plot Holes Created By a Single Scene, Dan Humphrey was revealed to be a psychopath the one posting all those years, which makes absolutely no sense.
This was the showrunner’s attempt to one-up the audience, which had already predicted Gossip Girl could only be Eric, Dorota (Zuzanna Szadkowski), or maybe even Georgina Sparks (Michelle Trachtenberg), as they were all close and distant enough to the main characters to get the kind of information GG had without being noticed. However, the writers failed to notice that the identity of GG could go unrevealed, because what she represented and how she managed to influence a whole bunch of people was more important than who she was.
Now, there is no mystery of who Gossip Girl is. The first episode tells you upfront who decides to bring GG back to life, which removes one potential problem right off the bat. Of course, if this idea holds up or not depends entirely on how long the new Gossip Girl airs and what it does throughout its run, but in the meantime we’ll tell you how it goes. xoxo.
Gossip Girl drops new episodes every Thursday on HBO Max.