Gossip Girl reboot to suggest the real Gossip Girl was the friends we made along the way

By William Hughes | July 26, 2019 | 10:38pm

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Gossip Girl reboot to suggest the real Gossip Girl was the friends we made along the way

Photo: Jason Merritt

HBO announced earlier this month that its plans to lure viewers into the web of its new streaming service HBO Max included a somewhat unlikely piece of bait: A reboot of The CW’s Gossip Girl, the show that dared to dream that someday bloggers might change the world (or, at least, the world of uber-rich, drama-prone New York socialites). Now, co-creator/rebooter Josh Schwartz has revealed some new details about the show, including one of the weirder things you could announce about a recreation of Gossip Girl: That there won’t be a “Who is Gossip Girl?” mystery underpinning all the high society blow-ups and blow-outs this time around.

“We felt like there was something really interesting about this idea that we were all Gossip Girl now in our own way,” Schwartz said, a heartwarming notion that suggests that the advent of smartphones and ubiquitous internet-connected cameras has made us all, deep in our hearts, an extremely catty Kristen Bell. (Who, presumably, won’t be reprising her narrator role for the series, since having a million internal Kristens all snarking along together might get a little loud.) The new series will instead focus on a new cast of teen and young adult characters, rather than the old, retired-teen ones—although Schwartz was quick to point out that the shows will take place in the same universe, and that the door was open for any members of the original cast to pop by and let their teensy inner Kristens out.