A (Belated) Autopsy of the 'Gossip Girl' Reboot
Welcome back!
My latest essay for Flood, on ‘Movie 43’
First LLIAG of 2023! WoOo! Drink a glass of water and remember to floss.
Thoughts On The Gossip Girl Reboot (RIP)
Just before the second season finale, it was announced that HBO Max’s critically dismissed reboot of Gossip Girl was canceled (though I guess there’s a chance it gets a third season on Tubi or whatever). The news wasn’t a huge surprise. The show never had the awards buzz of Euphoria or the WTF buzz of Riverdale. Tellingly, GG2.0 itself had begun to show symptoms of desperation, making increasing, and increasingly ham-fisted, references to the original in an attempt to remind viewers what they liked about the franchise. The strategy backfired, instead showcasing the reboot’s many shortcomings in comparison. In a recent subplot, two characters schemed to get Lady Gaga to attend…some event…mentioning she’d been friends with OG GG HBIC Blair Waldorf. Gaga appears, briefly, from behind, and of course it’s not really her. The takeaway is unflattering: the first show had the cache to land a cameo from an A-list pop star; the second could only muster a contextless Charli XCX performance.
What went wrong? Plenty. But for me, this was the crux: in the decade between the two shows’ premieres, the media landscape, and the transmission of gossip itself, changed too much for Gossip Girl — be she a blog, Instagram account or person — to hold requisite sway. (From here on, I’m using GG to denote the series and Gossip Girl to reference about the in-universe apparatus)
For the uninitiated, here’s a primer:
(No, I don’t actually expect you to watch that whole thing, though if you enjoy TV recaps, I highly recommend Mike’s Mic.)
The premise of the original, based on a packaged YA book series, was sorta kinda simple: what if there was a Page Six about your school? For the first two seasons, when the central characters — spawn of super-wealthy New Yorkers — were in high school, an anonymous blog chronicled their adventures and scandals, culled from tips sent in by their classmates, and blasted out breaking news straight to their cell phones. Gossip Girl didn’t directly affect the plot in every episode, so when she made a move, it carried weight. Voiced by Kristen Bell, she also provided commentary, thematically tying storylines together the same way SATC’s Carrie did in her column.
Beyond pushing the plot forward and providing conflict at key moments, Gossip Girl had a clear role to play in the ecosystem of the show: social arbiter. From the get-go, the characters wanted their names in the New York Times, their work in The New Yorker and their faces in Vogue. But attention from traditional media was sporadic. Gossip Girl, on the other hand, announced who was In and Out on a near-daily basis. She provided the story behind the story: WWD reported that a fashion show fell apart, but Gossip Girl revealed the feud that led to the disaster. And she covered news tabloids didn’t care about, like who was dealing drugs or might be pregnant. She was the only digital, anonymous, tip-based rag in town, giving her a singular utility and stature.
When GG premiered in 2007, the idea that a savvy teenager could set up a website with a text-based inbox/outbox feature was novel but not ridiculous. The first iPhone had just hit the market, though the GG gang wouldn’t get them for a bit, due to a partnership with Verizon. Facebook and Reddit were both a few years old; Twitter just a few months old. 2007 was the year TMZ became a TV show, and the year of Socialite Rank. The path from the real world to the Internet was becoming a two-way street, with online gossip having IRL consequences. A viral video had already ruined the reputation — and arguably the life — of a privileged young woman in Manhattan known, unfortunately, as Swiffer Girl. While GG was airing its second season, teenagers in Los Angeles used sites like Perez Hilton (which could still make or break a reputation) to locate the homes of stars and burgle them, becoming the Bling Ring.
Internet anonymity had been a device for a while (You’ve Got Mail), but GG was one of the first shows to effectively incorporate grainy cellphone footage into its plot. Was it lightning in a bottle? Or the start of a new normal? In 2010, another teen show based on a packaged series premiered in which the main characters got secret-revealing texts from an anonymous source: Pretty Little Liars. In PLL, the author of the texts, “A,” was clearly the antagonist, whereas in GG, the blog was more of an existential force the characters didn’t have direct beef with until midway through. “A” had an agenda, while Gossip Girl’s motive was…gossip. Both shows used cell phones to make the Mean Girls Burn Book sequence a regular occurrence. Clearly, audiences were down to watch actors send and receive texts, as long as the texts were sufficiently juicy. Something different. Something unexpected. Something you wouldn’t otherwise know.
As GG went on, the logistics of the enterprise became more far-fetched, and by the end, the show was twisting itself in knots to explain who Gossip Girl was. But it didn’t matter! By then, viewers had bought in — or not. The pilot sells the idea (it’s a fucking great pilot), and once you get a fan on board, you can take them to ever-more-ridiculous places. See: Lost, Weeds, Scandal, the Fast & Furious franchise.
Meanwhile, reality was catching up to fiction. During GG’s run between 2007 and 2012, “sexting” and “cyberbullying” were added to the dictionary, Catfish premiered in theaters and entered the lexicon, and Instagram launched.
After GG went off the air, it only became more prophetic. Kim Kardashian leaked a video via Snapchat that nearly ended the biggest pop star in the world. #MeToo happened and the Shitty Media Men list circulated in its wake. QAnon and Pizzagate demonstrated the destructive power of people taking online hoaxes as fact. After the pandemic cut us off from the real world, social media reached a kind of mass hysteria, and we snitched on each other like never before (Adam Levine, Matthew Perry, West Elm Caleb).
Today, we have myriad sources of often-anonymous gossip. CDAN, The Shade Room, Diet Prada, Deux Moi, Are We Dating The Same Guy? Facebook groups, to name a few. @SheRatesDogs broke the Chris D’Elia story. There are accounts dedicated to documenting celebrities’ Photoshops and the misdeeds of single influencers.
When the pandemic-delayed reboot premiered in July 2021, it was a different world, and a different worldwide web. In the pilot, Gossip Girl is resurrected as an Instagram account. A distinctly not-novel idea.
A full year earlier, students at the elite NYC private high schools Constance Billard was based on actually did make anonymous Instagram accounts, but they used the technology not to report rumors but to address systemic racism. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, Black students at Chapin, Spence, Nightingale-Bamford, Brearley and more came forward with experiences of on-campus racism and micro-aggressions on dedicated “Black at ____” Instagram accounts. The original was ahead of the curve. The reboot was playing catch-up, and was already culturally out of touch.
It was already going to be an uphill battle to sell the idea that a single blog or blog equivalent in 2021 could have the undiluted power Gossip Girl wielded in 2007, but the reboot compounded this problem by setting itself another trap: from the start, Queen Bee and Gossip Girl target #1 Julien was already famous. In the original, Serena and Gossip Girl had a toxic but symbiotic relationship: each made the other relevant, at the expense of Serena’s private life. But Julien is the It Girl daughter of a big time music producer. She’s an influencer who chronicles her days on Instagram Stories and who’s used to her nightly exploits being covered in the Daily Mail. She doesn’t have a private life.
(The She’s All That remake also made its popular girl an influencer, and sadly, I don’t foresee this lazy trope dying anytime soon.)
What function does Gossip Girl serve that existing media outlets don’t? If Julien is a celebrity in her own right, she’s gotta have haters. What’s another voice in a chorus of boos? Because that’s Gossip Girl’s stated raison d'etre: bringing Julien et al. down to Earth by exposing whatever Julien has cleverly kept hidden from her followers. Which is sort of an interesting goal, but it’s also splitting hairs about the effects of fame (the fact that she’s already a decent person, for a rich teenager, at the start, also mucks up the narrative). So let me split a few of my own, just for argument’s sake:
In both GG1 and Pretty Little Liars, the mechanism by which characters send and receive messages is via technology that could but doesn’t exist. In other words, audiences had to accept that “A” and Gossip Girl could provide whatever function the plot called for, because they had no 1-to-1 “real” mechanism to compare it to. But in the reboot, Gossip Girl is an Instagram account, and we all know how Instagram works. Much ado is made of a character utilizing “vanish mode,” a real Instagram feature. But in another episode, Julien wants to obscure her location, so she gives her friends her log-in information so they can post “as her” from here and there. She didn’t need to do that. Despite the name, Instagram doesn’t require you to upload instantaneously. They could have just texted her pictures and videos from around the city for her to upload from her bathtub.
But okay, it’s more fun to watch them pretend to be her. Still, this gambit works way too well. Other characters are just flabbergasted that she appears to be in two places at once, as if influencers haven’t been faking ritzy vacations since the start of the app. There’s a whole movie about this — Not Okay — which provides a much more coherent look at the pros and cons of influencerdom. Like I said, splitting hairs, but if the writers had made Gossip Girl a new app, for instance, I wouldn’t be able to pick apart how it works or doesn’t. (The show tried to skirt some of the logistical holes by making one of the teachers involved in Gossip Girl the computer science teacher, who can install and un-install all-powerful firewalls on the campus wi-fi at a moment’s notice. Whatever.)
It was all an adult’s idea of how teens use technology (I won’t even get into the cringey hashtags and ugly grid posts). The depiction of TikTok trends and supposedly viral content was completely divorced from the real Internet, and the reboot still failed to dramatize the cause and effect between what happened and what was posted. Viewers were repeatedly told that Julien was losing followers based on what Gossip Girl said, but there was no tab at the bottom of the screen showing the day’s gains and losses. There were Instagram profiles for the main characters, but were those stats updated in real time? The audience could, I guess, track when Julien was more and less beloved/powerful/influential based on her team’s daily briefings, but I don’t think anyone did. Even when Gossip Girl broke a story big enough to really bring Julien down — her dad is a predator — we’re told the story was probably gonna come out eventually anyway. The account is redundant and irrelevant.
Near the end of the second and likely final season, Gossip Girl finally found a unique purpose within the media landscape: she laundered family secrets, helping rich kids snitch on their evil parents. If only this had been the premise from the start! At any rate, that’s half of what happens on Succession.
What would a successful GG have looked like in 2023? I’ve got pitches:
Take the same tack as the original, starting with a world in which Gossip Girl already exists and matters, perhaps posting once daily to give each episode a central event.
Instead of relying on tips, make her a hacker. Everyone keeps everything on their phones, so if you can get in, you’ve got dirt others can’t scoop.
To eliminate competing outlets, set the show in a rich, insular community like Greenwich or Westchester, somewhere without paparazzi. Even better: a boarding school (It Girl spin-off with a Hope Hicks cameo, anyone?). Netflix’s Do Revenge, which I liked a lot, comes close to this idea.
In fact, if you limit the available sources of information enough, you don’t even need the tech. Bridgerton is GG in print.
In fairness, reboots are tricky. Pretty Little Liars also came back on HBO Max and was also met with mixed reactions. It got a second season, but we’ll see!
What do you think doomed the reboot? Or did you love it? Let’s keep the convo going in the comments.
You Know You Love Me. XOXO,
Lizzie
PS— this was going to be a 2-part essay positing that the Gawker reboot, resurrected from the ashes of the Hulk Hogan trial by many of the same people who wrote for the first iteration (the fact that few of them moved on to bigger/better things after the site’s untimely demise is…interesting), was doomed for parallel reasons, but as this issue was going to print, nuGawker also got the axe, which not only proved my point but made writing about its flaws seem kind of rude. I don’t know why picking apart a defunct blog is meaner than picking apart a defunct streaming show, but it is, so I won’t.
Instead, I’ll leave you with one of the best things ever published online: Caity Weaver eating mozzarella sticks.
As someone who snuck down into the basement of her family home to secretly watch GG air on the CW Mondays 8/7c FOR YEARS, I was so excited and so nervous for the reboot. I wanted to love it, but I knew from the pilot that the premise was going nowhere fast. Placing GG in the hands of the teachers was a cardinal sin, IMO. The OG GG had novelty, opulence, wit, and chemistry. The reboot had... opulence, I guess? The acting (of all things!) frequently felt robotic and sexless - another cardinal sin. I think the most damning thing the reboot failed to understand is that baked into the core of every scheme, sabotage, and melodramatic showdown in the OG GG was FUN. I can't and won't elaborate further!
You're so right - a GG reboot taking place in an elite bougie boarding school bubble would've been a hit. Every point you made in this was dead on. Reading it gave me the closure I needed (lol). I can now bury the reboot, move on, and return to referring to the OG GG as the definitive Gossip Girl.
You're totally right about the way the reboot just didn't do the work of making Gossip Girl an actual, relevant threat but I think this show also suffered from something simpler: wasn't horny enough! There were no characters whose chemistry carried any of the episodes - the Obie/Zoya/Julien triangle was hardly interesting and dropped pretty fast, the throuple was somehow boring to watch. The first few seasons of original Gossip Girl are buoyed by the relationships you care about seeing! As questionable as the actor Ed Westwick is, we loved Blair and Chuck! Also the GG2 parent-level storylines were somehow also sexless? Zoya's dad and the Tavi Gevinson teacher were comical to watch, one of the parents having a hired mistress played out almost totally offscreen. Sex was discussed but not present! Also the ethics of the teens was adult-level in a way that made the drama boring - teenagers are really going to be sooo honest they'll realize they should be in a throuple? I think probably they'll just cheat and have weird threesomes for a long time first! All cheating was resolved in a few short episodes instead of becoming an interesting secret. Maybe the writers thought that was reflective of the times - but is that really true for people under the age of 18? Anyway I could go on (episode lengths were OUT OF CONTROL) - but I appreciate this post!!!