Thirteen long years ago, I cut my teeth as a blogger by recapping Gossip Girl, the CW’s soapy series about mean teens on the decidedly un-mean streets of the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
Where were the drugs and the sex, so dishily strewn across the pages? The show had to be more tame, because it was on network television and ostensibly aimed at teenagers.
The way they talked about the show—amused, jaded, ironic—made me miss the old days of slavishly covering the exploits of Serena van der Woodsen, her best frenemy Blair Waldorf, and the various boys caught in their orbit.
The show, no longer bound by the mores of broadcast television, can be wilder, more transgressive, more sharply tuned into the evils of wealth hoarded in palaces looming over Central Park.
A more diverse cast, as the new series boasts, ought to provide more windows into this culture of entitlement and vanity, more perspectives from which to revel in and revolt against its excesses.
How do you have fun with the world of these cruel kids and their social obsessions—from which the likes of Ivanka Trump was born—without, in some senses, forgiving it? Maybe Safran and his writers can figure it out.
Gossip Girl 2.0 could be one of the rare pieces of entertainment to get digital metaphysics right, and not just show kids staring inertly at their phones.
Young people today are even savvier than we were in those heady days of the late aughts, and their Gossip Girl will need to be that much more agile and clever to satisfy them.
Vanity Fair may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers.