Gossip Girl 2021 Review (based on one episode)
This new version of Gossip Girl takes place in the same continuity as the first one, nine years after the ending of the last series. (Technically four years after the ending of the last series since the final scene is a five year time jump, but I get what they’re saying.) Now we have a new group of elite students going to Constance, with the main cast being made up of seven lifelong friends, with their leader being Julien, the It Girl, of the in crowd and already a major social media influencer. Our insisting incident is the arrival of Zoya, Julien’s younger half sister, who she has never met, or so it would seem. It turns out that the two sisters have been getting to know each other over the past two years and Zoya’s arrival is the end result of a long laid out plan between the sisters to finally meet. But just getting Zoya to Constance was the easy part. Julien’s plan to integrate Zoya into her elite friend group doesn’t work out as smoothly as she foresaw, and things are complicated even further by the return of the rumor mill known as Gossip Girl.
The show spends some time making sure we all know that this is a continuation of the first series with Blair, Serena, Nate, Chuck, and Dan all being name-dropped at some point in the opening episode. We also get several lines early on acknowledging critiques of the original show such as the relationship between Blair and Chuck being incredibly problematic, as well as the limited amount of diversity that existed in the original cast lineup. These lines definitely stick out as the writers trying to voice their awareness of the old show and it’s flaws, maybe as something like a promise to do better in the reboot.
And this brings us to the most talked about aspect of this new version of Gossip Girl, and that’s the fact that we already know who Gossip Girl is. While the first show kept the author’s identity a secret until the last episode, in this pilot, we learn that the rebooted Gossip Girl is being created by a group of four teachers at the school. The idea is that the students were once upon a time kept in line by the shame that Gossip Girl brought to the school, and that without it, they’ve got nothing to keep them in check.
Regardless of who is the true identity behind Gossip Girl, it's a smart idea to go ahead and reveal the author(s), as that sets this series apart from the original right off the bat. While Gossip Girl’s identity was never the central part of the original series, knowing that it would be eventually revealed was something that cast a series long shadow, and something that resulted in a reveal that couldn’t hold up under any real scrutiny. Flipping the script and outing the source behind Gossip Girl, making it an integral part of the series, lets this new series explore story avenues that were forever locked off from the original series.
Maybe I’m showing my old fogey outlook here, but the teacher's storyline is, so far, more interesting to me than the students. Initial reactions to the episode have been critical to the idea that this group of teachers would try to tear down their students like this and have complained about how unlikable this makes the teachers. This to me, is the very “Gossip Girl” aspect of it. Doing something mean, vindictive, and petty, while convincing yourself that you’re doing it for noble reasons is a classic flawed character formula. We have a group of teachers who are essentially cyberbullying their students because their students are mean to them, while telling themselves it’s all for their own good, and are helping to shape them into better people. That's a perfect soap opera recipe for some comeuppance that I’m assuming is down the line. I would hope that a show that takes the time to insert a line about Blair and Chuck’s story not surviving in a post “Me Too” era, would also see the issue with a male teacher taking pictures of a fourteen year old student undressing through the window. The teachers aren’t presented as any better than the students here. They’re all presented as characters on a Gossip Girl tv show. Again this is just the first episode and this could all lead to nothing, but involving the teachers at the school, and having the audience know about the people behind the curtain from the start gives this show the opportunity to explore new areas, and not just remix Gossip Girl 1.0’s greatest hits.
But ultimately, the students are the ones that will (and should) be the primary focus of the show. Most of our character development for the first episode focused on Zoya and Julien. We get a lot of information about both characters, and it’s pretty clear that this is going to be one of the defining relationships throughout the series. It would be easy to say that their relationship is being set up to recreate the Blair/Serena dynamic of the original (the show even name drops the two original character in setting up the sisters), but enough time has been given to the development of their relationship, as well as the development of each individual character that it’s already evolved into its own thing. The same, however, can not be said for other members of the group. It’s easy to see what character was cast as a “potential Chuck” or “potential Nate” or any other re-creation of a character from the original. You can even see bread crumbs being spread out for redos of some of the original series' more memorable plot lines. Still it’s important to remember that this is the first episode. There’s a lot of evolving even for the best of characters from their first introduction.
What the show does well with the students though, is make sure that we’re placed squarely in the year 2021, and that this is a current generation of students. The coronavirus references are kind of sour (the idea that things will be entirely normal in time for fall semesters is overly optimistic at this point) but the show’s focus on social media feels monumental. Gossip Girl was a blog back in 2007 when the first show started. The idea that these teenagers were a certain level of famous just because of a gossip blog that focused on a group of high school students was a suspension of disbelief that you just had to roll with to enjoy the story. Now, such a thing exists. Julien as a social media influencer feels like a very real thing. Her focus on the story, creating and cultivating a very specific online image feels like a very real thing. The rise and dominance of social media between 2007 and today is unavoidable, and has to take front and center for this series.
Ultimately, the best thing about the show is that it feels like Gossip Girl. Maybe it’s Kristen Bell returning as the voice of the show. Maybe it’s the betrayal storyline that dominates the first episode. Maybe it’s the school uniforms that look so familiar. Maybe it’s the music choices. Really, it’s probably all of the above, and just a little bit more. It scratches the Gossip Girl itch. It a very specific type of TV show, and while Gossip Girl was never the only player in the game, it was one that knew how to hit all the right buttons, and this show, at least one episode in, feels like Gossip Girl.
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