Spoilers for episode one ahead.
Like most of the things I watched when I was younger, I never really fully understood the shows I was watching with the understanding needed. Like when I watched family guy or South Park most jokes went over my head. When I watched Gossip Girl, the original, I had no clue that high school students shouldn’t behave and do the things that they do, I just enjoyed the drama and theatricality.
Watching this new Gossip Girl, now, as an adult who knows better, I still live for the franchises particular brand of drama and scandal. There’s a new group of hot rich kids hanging on the Met steps, and they do their predecessors proud with how easily they concoct and fall for drama.
New queen bee Julien Calloway is in charge of the new amorphous blob of hotties, I don’t know all their names yet, and introduces her estranged little sister Zoya to the school where Chuck, Blair and Serena cut their teeth in the mid two thousands.
Zoya plays a familiar role, an outsider with not a lot of money, reminding viewers of Dan Humphries. But she’s not the only clone, along with new queen Julienne, who shares similarities with the original main cast; There’s a sexed-up, sleazy slime ball who sleeps around; there’s an intellectual, good looking guy; there’s a quiet, mousy blonde who seems to want to sink into the background. So, the creators aren’t truly departing and starting from scratch, there are some familiar building blocks present.
They do the same ridiculously inappropriate things, sex in clubs, drugs, drinking and then they go to events and fashion shows, before posting to their socials, creating social media stories. That’s new, but we all know Gossip Girl couldn’t return to her throne with a blog, she needs social media in 2021.
Except this time, we know who the new Gossip Girl is. It’s not the ridiculous person it was in the original, it’s in fact run by the teachers at the school where these kids reside.
That’s right! The teachers, sick of overly entitled teens and their well to do parents walking all over them, decide to dig up the old persona of Gossip Girl, whose blog they scan through creepily a decade after the site went dark.
I’m not even sure there were teachers in the original gossip girl, let alone ones who were so hard done by that they resort to cyberstalking and bullying teenagers based on rumours and scandals they come across.
It should sound stupid, but they openly do this within the first ten minutes and it’s hilarious.
So does this new version hold up to the original you ask? In my opinion, yes. Why? Well, I’ll tell you.
It keeps that camp sensibility, of a richy rich world we could never aspire to, and their petty dramas remain titillating, to say the least. When Zoya “ruins” her sister's fashion show, or when the blonde girl (I’ll get their names eventually) starts to pine for Chuck Bass Jr instead of her boyfriend, you gasp and are fully sucked in. I don’t know whether it’s because the show relies heavily on older archetypes, or that it has in fact modernised itself enough to not seem dated and unrealistic I don’t know.
Plus, the incomparable Kristen Bell is the narrator once more, whether that makes sense or not, it doesn’t matter, because her presence legitimises the show somewhat and you really feel like you’re back in it.
I think it still works because there are kids out there making there money off of social media the way that these characters do. It’s possible, and, as with the original, it’s incredibly satisfying watching these “influencers” air their dirty laundry and get taken down a peg.
(I Really want to end this by saying “you know you love me, xoxo…” but that’s too much, right?)
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