Gossip Girl is back! The premiere episode of HBO Max’s browner, queerer, more messily progressive take on the lives of privileged Upper East Side teens premieres tonight, to the delight of some and the bafflement of others. We’ve all got a lot of questions about this questionable revival. Here’s what you need to know going in.
Let’s Start With How And When To Watch:
The reboot is streaming on HBO Max starting tonight, but you probably already knew that, right? New episodes drop every Thursday, so you’ll have to savor the intrigue over the next few weeks. And we do mean few: the show’s first season is airing in two six-episode parts, with the second batch premiering this fall.
Now, The Juicy Details:
The new series mostly revolves around half-sisters Julien (Jordan Alexander), a privileged influencer, and Zoya (Whitney Peak), a smart cookie from a more modest background. The pair cook up a scheme to get Zoya into elite prep school Constance Billard, where Jules hopes to seamlessly integrate her little sis into her clique. But, this being Gossip Girl, their sisterly bond begins to break down in the high pressure environment of the Upper East Side, and pretty soon jealousy leads to intrigue, leads to that unending carousel of unshakable friendship and all-consuming vendetta that gave us all perpetual whiplash in the Serena vs. Blair era.
So…How Risque Is It?
It’s not TV. It’s not even HBO; it’s HBO Max! So, yeah, the new GG can do things the old never could on network television. But it doesn’t go nuts. Yes, there’s sex; yes, there’s swearing; yes, there’s some flagrant drug use. There’s even a little male nudity! But, based on the four episodes provided to critics, this isn’t going to be Game of Thrones. Not yet anyway.
Oh, You Want Dirt?
So, ok, the initial reviews are in, and they haven’t been great. The show’s cast of young, mostly newcomers hasn’t really managed to spark the interest that Blake Lively and Leighton Meester did from Day 1 on the original. “While their diversity as a group stands out, no performer ends up doing so as an individual,” The Ringer’s Alison Herman wrote. Meanwhile, Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson worries that the new GG is hamstrung by its own uncertainty about what it wants to be. “A skewering of the monied, immoral world of the 0.1 percent should feel entirely welcome right now,” he writes. “Gossip Girl takes a dismayingly gentle tack, though, zooming in on the pathos after tossing out a few creaky cultural references and limp barbs about wokeness and privilege. The show puts a mighty onus on its largely untested young cast, asking them to thread an impossible needle.” Still, as more than one reviewer has pointed out, the show has potential.
And One Big Spoiler:
We know who Gossip Girl is. It’s no mystery, really. We find out in, like, the first 10 minutes of the premiere—which, I guess is also kind of a spoiler. But you were warned. But, ok, stop reading now if you don’t want the deets.
The new series takes place in the same universe as the old, so the blog that documented the foibles of Serena, Blair, et. al. is a thing that certain Constance Billard faculty remember. A small group of underpaid, overworked and undervalued teachers, led by Tavi Gevinson’s Kate Keller, hatch a plan to reign in their students’ behavior by reviving Gossip Girl as an Instagram account, the idea being that maybe they’ll learn some humility with their dirty laundry splashed all over social media.
