Why the Gossip Girl reboot hasn't felt "fun" after half a season

Vanity Fair

The original Gossip Girl, says Delia Cai, "succeeded as a send-up of privilege wielded by real estate moguls and old money heiresses—A.K.A. white privilege. If we zoom out of the GG universe for a moment, we can see that one decade later, that’s still the throughline of most prestige programs. We’re at a point where all-white casts and storylines can be considered tacky, unless it’s all in service to making fun of white privilege. Then it’s not only okay—it can be extremely funny. Take the success of The White Lotus, an HBO hit about the wealthy (white) patrons of a Hawaiian resort. As the LA Times noted, there are non-white characters here, but they exist on the periphery—not only to those main white characters, but in the show’s worldview, too. The Undoing, another HBO pandemic fave, was essentially billed as a twist on Big Little Lies, swapping the tribulations of several wealthy white women in California for just one woman’s unraveling on the Upper East Side. Need I even mention a certain chattering class’s obsession with Succession? I’ll be the first to say that glossy, escapist television is one of the last remaining tendrils holding my psyche together. But it’s time to admit that there’s a dark lining to the appeal of these newer shows—as if punching up on the 1 percent equals a 'get out of jail free' card when it comes to Diversity Stuff. If it’s satire, if we’re all in on the joke that rich white people suck, then we can have our cake and eat it while waving pitchforks at the Bezoses, too. Which brings me back to the new Gossip Girl. The 2021 version of Gossip Girl is obsessed with privilege as well, but a different, non-white kind. To call the series 'woke' feels reductive. More accurately, new Gossip Girl is a show that centers Black cultural authority as the hallmark of status. Julien and Zoya, the sometimes-opposing queen bees, are two Black girls (both light-skinned, which raises important questions about colorism) who carry Revolution Books totes and wear LaQuan Smith. In keeping with the original show’s formula, where each episode’s drama coalesces around one main event, this version trades the New York City Ballet and Jared and Ivanka party circuit for Jeremy O. Harris at the Public and a Christopher John Rogers show. (Backstage, a Lindsay Peoples Wagner cameo establishes Julien’s approval by the fashion institution). The guest artist who performs at Julien’s party is Princess Nokia. At Halloween, Zoya and Julien decide to dress up as the most famous Black sisters on earth: Solange and Beyoncé. The breadth of references to real-life Black and afro-indigenous cultural authorities is refreshing; a mainstream show where teens live and breathe Black art as the cultural default feels like a revelation. But though the new Gossip Girl succeeds in depicting the kind of privilege that takes us from protest to Net-A-Porter all in one day, it stops short of truly engaging with the accompanying concepts of power and elitism. And maybe that’s why it doesn’t feel 'fun.' It’s beautiful and interesting and a little revolutionary—but watching it is just not the same as laughing at rich white people doing rich white people things."

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• Gossip Girl's disappointment lies with its fundamental storytelling flaws and lack of focus on the teens: "This show is bait for a lot of 'can you write a woke teen drama' think pieces, but looking at it that way skates over its unrelated but fundamental storytelling flaws," says Jackson McHenry. "Often, it’s easy to forget what any of the teens want in any given episode — aside from maybe the fact that Julien wants a Sephora deal or Not Chuck wants to get off. They’re mostly reactive characters, to their parents’ drama or to whatever Tavi gins up. I would kill for a basic OG GG seasons one or two plot like 'they all want to impress an Ivy League recruitment officer!' or 'they need to get their parents’ money back from a scammer!' Part of the essential witch’s brew of the original run was that you always knew whatever Blair or Serena wanted, which was usually some form of power or access or status. That could be easily transmuted into a plot point about a deb ball or getting into Yale. Here, they seem to work backward from 'cool event' to 'why everyone wants to go there.' I was shocked when Dad Luke Kirby (sans hat, also a shock) mentioned Julien’s PSAT scores in this most recent episode, because I had forgotten that they even were still going to school." Kathryn VanArendonk adds: "There are no stakes! Sure, blonde girl wants her mom, Laura Benanti, to live. And Tavi apparently wants to hook up with Zoya’s dad. But beyond that, even when there is some event for the characters to react to, none of the bad consequences ever stick around. Photo shoot gone awry — fixed! Boyfriend’s mom hates you — whatever! For all the show’s supposed political consciousness, it has also lost track of any grounding in the real world. It’s not that I mind that as a character note; I’m sure that’s realistic for what some of these kids’ real lives would be like. As a storytelling problem, though, it means we now lack even the small, silly pressure of the OG series’s characters who had some (relative) financial hardship. It was an obstacle! It really mattered when someone didn’t have enough money to buy a ticket to a concert, or something. Zoya and her dad were supposed to fulfill that, but it disappeared almost instantly. Plus, characters without infinite buckets of money were useful benchmarks in the original series because they helped register the strangeness of the ultra-rich. It felt novel to see all these mega-monied teens slouching around New York. They were compelling because they got into all kinds of drama, but also because the show was able to retain some impression of them as outside the norm. In the reboot, the only characters who register the oddity of wildly wealthy teenagers are their teachers. And we can’t trust the teachers or sympathize with their perspectives, because all they do is hang around typing mean Instagram posts about their minor-aged students!"
• Gossip Girl has been an over-sexed dud so far, with parents who are more interesting than the students: "There have only been six episodes, so far, but they have all traveled predictable routes, and whatever notions the series had about dabbling in socioeconomic issues is as superficial as the rest of the series," says Dustin Rowles. "In fact, the parents are far more interesting than the students, particularly Julien’s father (the very handsome Luke Kirby) and Zola’s father (the very handsome Johnathan Fernandez), who had children with the same woman and who hate each other, at least for half an episode before they come together for the good of their daughters. It’s a shame they aren’t involved in the threesomes. Laura Benanti also plays the mother of Audrey; her failing businesses have driven her to drink and she and Audrey are knocking on the door of the poorhouse ('poorhouse,' again, being relative). I found the series exhilarating for about an episode and a half, because I thought there was an opportunity to at least be something akin to Succession set in high school. It soon began to wane, however, and by the midseason, it was basically a less interesting (though more coherent) Riverdale with no mystery and a lot more f**king."
• Jordan Alexander calls out the Allure photographer who walked in on her during a recent photo shoot: “This photo was taken by a creepy man who walked in on me while I was changing into this outfit,” she wrote on Instagram. “I confronted him and he got in my face and then ended up storming out. Sorry would have sufficed.” Alexander added: "If someone does something weird to you, you can feel free to talk about it. If you feel uncomfortable to do so, tell anyone you want to. It’s not your problem, it’s there’s."
• Thomas Doherty contracted COVID after delaying getting vaccinated, says playing a pansexual character is liberating: Doherty says he delayed getting vaccinated due to the busy demands of working on Gossip Girl. As for his character, Doherty says: “I have always seen sexuality as a spectrum. But playing Max, a pansexual character, was incredibly liberating. It was very educational, and it definitely made me challenge my own preconceived notions, my indoctrination, of ‘This is who you love, this is what you do, everything else is wrong.’”
• Evan Mock recalls preparing for his threesome scene with Gossip Girl's intimacy coordinator: "It’s always awkward, and it’s always weird, but Claire (Warden), the intimacy coordinator, delegated during the awkwardness and answered all our questions," says Mock. "It was just nice to feel comfortable in that situation when I didn’t think I would at all.”
• Showrunner Joshua Safran says that, unlike the original series, the reboot is following the structure of the books: "They feel very grounded," he says. "You really fall in love with them. So that later on when bigger things happen to them, you understand who they are when they happen, as opposed to just before you get to know them, you know, spinning them around in circles all the time… By the way, the first time around, people were like, 'We hate this.' So you know, that’s definitely not a place I want to be in. So instead, I looked to the original show and how much you really got to know these people and how much you really got to live in the pain of real things that happened. Blair losing her virginity or realizing her best friend slept with her boyfriend. These are real things. So that worked out. That’s the only real criticism that I read briefly, and then I was like, 'What? Go back and watch the original.'"
• Safran says Gossip Girls is "first and foremost" about class -- unlike teen shows Elite, Riverdale and Euphoria: "We had that conversation pretty much week one of this writer's room," he says. "'What is this show most about? It is most about class.' Gossip Girl is a class disruptor from the first one to now. Whether it was Dan or Anonymous, doesn't even matter. That's what she was. She was a disruptor and she is like, 'I am going to shake your golden cages until you fall out of them.' That is the goal of Gossip Girl. It's class warfare with one dictator, and it's been really fun to get back into that world. I could write this show every 15 years. As a country, we are starting to deal with these things, but it's the very nascent stages. There's just a lot there."
• Safran says more original Gossip Girl stars will appear in the back half of Season 1 -- but none of the main cast members