HBO Max's 'Gossip Girl' Sashays Into a New World

On a sultry June morning, a small battalion of camera operators, production assistants, and hair and makeup pros descended on a subway entrance on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. An assistant director barked a command and suddenly the ordinary commuters vanished, replaced by glam pedestrians attired in kicky fall fashion. Shoes gleamed, teeth glinted, each ponytail and pompadour shone. In an instant, a traffic median had transformed into a sweat-free space of sparkle, scandal, possibility. Spotted at 72nd and Broadway: “Gossip Girl,” back again. XOXO.

“Gossip Girl,” a sudsy and startlingly literate teen soap, debuted on the CW in 2007 and concluded in 2012. Set among the Upper East Side’s private school ultra-elite, the show never had great ratings. (It circled the 1 percent in more ways than one.) Many critics considered it beneath their dignity. “‘Gossip Girl’ was not great TV,” a 2012 New York Times valedictory read. “Far from it.”

But the show’s blazer-forward swagger, modeled by stars like Blake Lively, Leighton Meester and Penn Badgley, made it a favorite of the fashion pages. Its impenitent hedonism — the teens have sex, the teens take drugs, the teens briefly become minor royalty — and plots that burned through story like flash paper felt made-to-measure for the naughty aughts, even as a new generation has discovered it via streaming services. “Gossip Girl” paved the way, probably in Swarovski crystal, for the risqué teen shows that came after — “Pretty Little Liars,” “Riverdale,” “Euphoria.”

After a nine-year hiatus, a continuation of the series arrives on Thursday on HBO Max. (It’s not a reboot, the creators emphasized, because it exists in the same universe as the original.) It sashays into a somewhat different world — one changed by #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, with a different attitude toward wealth and privilege. So this “Gossip Girl” is different, too.

“Every generation gets the ‘Gossip Girl’ it deserves,” said Joshua Safran, the showrunner of this new series.

Since 2012, Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, who created “Gossip Girl,” had received multiple offers to extend and expand it. While they agreed to some franchise extensions (“Gossip Girl: Acapulco” exists), they could never find a compelling reason to revamp it.

Neither could Safran (“Smash,” “Soundtrack”), an executive producer on the original. And then one day, three years ago, he decided that he could. Safran, who grew up on the Upper East Side and attended the tony and occasionally scandal-centered private school Horace Mann, had a handful of friends who taught at private schools, for punishingly low salaries. They described a world in which teachers felt increasingly powerless, subject to both the demands of the parents and the contempt of the students.

Teachers were mostly invisible in the original series. That Shakespeare babe that Dan Humphrey (Badgley) slept with? The English prof that Serena van der Woodsen (Lively) dated? Rare exceptions.

In this new version, Safran suggested, the teachers could have a voice. A familiar voice — Kristen Bell’s, who performs the voice-over for each Gossip Girl post, then and now. In the first episode, the teachers, led by Kate (Tavi Gevinson), resurrect the Gossip Girl handle as a means to cow their students, an extremely online form of social control.

“The teachers are the same age as a lot of people who watched the show the first time around,” Gevinson said. “They’re a way in.”

The first series arrived in the infancy of social media. In this new one, the internet is all grown up. Gossip Girl posts to Instagram now, prying open the gap between the perfect selves we project online and the messier people we are off it. “I can see you,” an early post declares. “Not the you you’ve oh so carefully curated — the real you, the one hiding just outside the edge of frame. Well, it’s time to reframe the picture.”

The landscape of social media is, the show suggests, a treacherous one, and weeks before this new “Gossip Girl” aired, it had already attracted online outrage. In mid-May, stuck in line at a pharmacy, Safran offered to do a brief A.M.A. (“ask me anything”) on Twitter. One person asked if the new version would include slut-shaming and catfights. “No slut shaming,” he replied. “No catfights. Those are not things I believe need to be in this show for it to be fun. Or any show?” His mentions went nuts, with some refusing to believe that a series lacking girl-on-girl fountain shenanigans could still entertain.

When Variety published an article suggesting that these new characters would have some basic knowledge of wealth inequality, reply guys and girls lost their minds again. At that subway-station shoot, I saw Safran frowning at his phone. J.D. Vance had just trolled him. “Wokeness will make everything boring and ugly,” Vance, the “Hillbilly Elegy” author, had tweeted, along with the Variety article. (Vance recently announced a run for U.S. Senate. Maybe original “Gossip Girl” fans are a key demographic?)

Anyone who has seen the first HBO Max episode will have immediately noted that nothing is boring and of course no one is ugly. The New York that “Gossip Girl” presents is still very much a fantasy, though in contrast to the original, it is a more diverse fantasy. This version centers on two young women of color, the suddenly reunited half sisters Julien (Jordan Alexander) and Zoya (Whitney Peak), and their multiracial friend group, a necessary improvement on the original.

“The original show kind of completely avoided being aware of discrimination,” said Peak, who had binged it online. “It was very much just rich people and rich-people problems.”

But discrimination of course existed, even in the wealthiest environments. In 2019, as the first episodes of the new “Gossip Girl” were being written, Black alumnae of many of the city’s top private schools — Brearley, Chapin, Spence — took to Instagram to discuss their experiences. These posts suggested a need for more conversation around prejudice and equity.

It was a conversation that Karena Evans, who directed the pilot of the new series, was eager to have. Evans (“P-Valley”) adored the original. But as a Black woman, she had never seen a character who looked like her on it. This time around, she wanted to show viewers, particularly young women of color, that they all belonged in this world.

“At its core, it’s the ‘Gossip Girl’ that you love,” she said. “But what is fresh about it is that it is inclusive, and it is diverse, and it is queer, and it is self-aware.”

About that self-awareness: Yes, the show now acknowledges that not everyone flies private. One young character even explains that “privilege ignores the realities of systemic issues.” Which is sweet. But decadence abounds. The teenage characters belong to a private club. They attend — and model in — a Christopher John Rogers show. They throw intimate soirees at Webster Hall.

As the first episode establishes, the look of the show is bolder now, less sanitized. “Karena’s eye is this sumptuous, beautiful thing, while also showing you the rot on the edges,” Safran said. “You get the candy and the toothache afterward.”

“Gossip Girl” had to deliver this candy even as Covid-19 restrictions limited the locations and the number of actors in each scene. (Look closely and you’ll see the same attractive extras again and again and again.) But the show was never only about the luxury — or the sex, the drugs and the unplanned pregnancies. The original had a literariness that set it apart from most teen shows. Put it this way: “The O.C.” never staged “The Age of Innocence” as a school play. Safran describes the show’s deep structure as a comedy of manners. Its tone, then and now, owes nearly as much to Jane Austen as to “Dynasty.”

The new version maintains this sophistication even as the move from the CW to HBO Max offers new latitude for debauchery and some less than literary language. The creators had contemplated leaning into that. Maybe, as Savage joked (at least I think she was joking), they could offer even more full-frontal nudity than “Euphoria.”

“We were like, is that really ‘Gossip Girl’?” Savage recalled. “Is that how we roll? It’s kind of not.”

Instead, this “Gossip Girl” embraces its urbanity, often in a cheeky, self-referential way. (OK, it also embraces semipublic teen cunnilingus in the first episode.) In one scene, Kate, an Iowa Writers’ Workshop dropout, compares Gossip Girl’s original posts to a lost Edith Wharton novel. In another, she says of the Gossip Girl voice, “It’s like if E.M. Forster got roofied by Dorothy Parker and Jacqueline Susann.” The teens read James Baldwin and Eve Babitz just for kicks, as teens do.

Which is to say that the original “Gossip Girl” had a glancing relationship with observable reality and that goes for this one as well, however it has changed. “I really, genuinely hope that it provides the escapism and the fun that we all need right now,” said Alexander, who plays the show’s teen queen.

Evans laughed at the idea that a “woke” show couldn’t be as thrilling and beautiful as anything else on television.

“It’s got to stay glamorous,” she said. “Come on, it’s ‘Gossip Girl.’”