Greetings, Upper East Siders. (And, like, everyone else.) The powers that be over at WarnerMedia’s new streaming service have delivered their latest teen drama news, and it is juicy. Per Deadline, a reboot of Gossip Girl is heading to yet-to-launch HBO Max, and though it’s sans Serena (Blake Lively) and Blair (Leighton Meester), it certainly won’t be missing any drama.
The news comes months after CW president Mark Pedowitz claimed at the Television Critics Association that talks were happening for a potential reboot, but that it would only occur if the original team — Joshua Safran, Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage — signed on. Bless: They have.
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For the uninitiated, Gossip Girl ran on The CW from 2007 to 2012, and was hugely influential on pop culture. (And by “hugely influential,” I mean I wore tights under shorts for like, three years straight.) It starred Meester as Blair, the Queen Bee of the Upper East Side, who was constantly battling her own insecurities when compared to her modelesque BFF Serena (Lively). There was boy drama — especially when it involved Chuck (Ed Westwick), Blair’s endgame love interest and Serena’s stepbrother, and Dan (Penn Badgley), Serena’s endgame love interest, and um, also stepbrother — struggles for power, and gorgeous clothes. Oh, and there was the titular Gossip Girl, an omnipresent blogger who documented the scandalous lives of Manhattan’s elite, and revealed more than a few of their secrets.
The problem with a potential reboot of Gossip Girl? These days, it’s social media that tells all, and usually directly from the source. That’s exactly what the HBO Max series, which received a 10 episode order on the streaming service, will dive into. The show will take place eight years after the original Gossip Girl site went dark (hmm, did Dan move to Los Angeles after an ill-fated romance with a certain writer?) and will explore “just how much social media — and the landscape of New York itself — has changed in the intervening years.”
Will Williamsburg finally be seen for the expensive hipster hub it is and not the trash dump Blair assumed it must be? One can only hope!