After a first broadcast in France on Warner TV, the new version of “Gossip Girl”, which is as much a sequel as a reboot, arrives today on TFX. Without Blair, Serena, Dan, or Chuck, does this series still have bite?
What is it about ?
Nine years after the closure of the Gossip Girl blog, a new group of high school students from New York’s Upper East Side find themselves targeted on social networks by the anonymous blogger, determined to reveal all their secrets.
Gossip Girl, new generationdeveloped by Joshua Safran according to original series aired between 2007 and 2012 on The CW.
With Jordan Alexander, Whitney Peak, Eli Brown, Thomas Doherty, Emily Alyn Lind, Tavi Gevinson, Evan Mock…
Every Friday at 9:05 p.m. on TFX at the rate of three episodes per week. 12 episodes seen out of 12.
Well worth a look ?
Cult for a whole generation, which was passionate about the adventures of Blair, Serena, Nate, Dan, Chuck, and Jenny at the end of the 2000s on TF1, or later discovered it in full on Netflix, Gossip Girl did it really need a reboot? Probably not. But in the era of remakes and other revisits of all kinds, from Charmed at RoswellPassing by The 4400 quite recently, the return of the small screen’s most feared anonymous blogger was certainly inevitable.
Headed by Joshua Safran (Quantico), who was already among the main writers and executive producers of the original series, so this next-gen Gossip Girl takes us back to New York City, on the steps of the MET, nearly a decade after Dan Humphrey’s shenanigans ended, so that a new gang of posh Upper East Side high schoolers become the targets of a new Gossip Girl, now running rampant through an all-too-informed Instagram account.
The plot of the pilot begins when Zoya Lott (Whitney Peak), a 14-year-old teenager from Buffalo who won a scholarship, joins the private high school of Constance Billard (whom fans know well) and finds her stepsister , Julien Calloway (Jordan Alexander), star influencer and “queen bee” of the school, whom she never knew because their respective fathers hate each other.
And while Julien seems ready to integrate Zoya into her social circle, made up of her boyfriend Obie (Eli Brown), the Audrey-Aki couple, or Max Wolfe (Thomas Doherty), who has nothing to envy to Chuck Bass, of course, not everything is going to go as planned. And the rivalries will arise, or reappear, drama obliges. But unfortunately, it’s all a bit too lackluster.
And the heroes of this reboot, who struggle to hide that they are reworked versions of the heroes of the original series – Audrey is the new Blair, Julien the new Serena, and Obie a mix between Nate and Dan – simply remind us of how point Leighton Meester, Blake LivelyWhere Penn Badgley are missing from this reboot as a sequel, which mentions their characters on a few occasions without them ever appearing on screen. For the moment at least.
HBO Max
More diverse in the characters it features and in the sexualities portrayed over the course of the episodes – where the original series was almost exclusively white and heterosexual – this new version of Gossip Girl also misses its subject somewhat, both she doesn’t care about the social disparities that exist in New York, even more in today’s America (after all Zoya is supposed to be the new Jenny/Dan Humphrey, foreign to this universe made of money and glitter) .
She also mentions the Covid and then immediately forgets it. And struggles to fully fit into the current era, beyond an effective soundtrack punctuated by the hits of Billie Eilish or Ariana Grande. As if little had changed since 2012, except the dominance of social networks. A somewhat surprising observation from Joshua Safran and the HBO Max platform.
Fortunately, even if the first episode turns out to be quite laborious and far too nice, everything is not missed in this reboot which has the good idea of offering a major twist compared to the series that preceded it: the identity from Gossip Girl is revealed early on and is therefore no mystery to the viewer. A good way to reshuffle the cards, not to make the same mistakes, and to take an interest in the consequences that such shenanigans and such dirty tricks can have on the person or persons hiding behind the dreaded Insta account. Which had never been explored with Dan.
In addition, over the episodes, some characters manage to gain depth and ultimately turn out to be quite endearing. Like Julien, more complex than one might think, Max, who could well be the most interesting and touching character in the series (and not just a Chuck bis), or even Audrey , who enjoys a complicated relationship with her mother that we hope will see developed, and soon finds herself at the heart of a love triangle all the more crispy with Aki and Max.
A triangle that will experience ups and downs during the 12 episodes of the first season and which almost alone justifies that we still give a chance to this new generation of Upper East Siders. Even if the ultra soap side of the original series is sorely lacking.
Let’s hope then that season 2, which should arrive on HBO Max in the coming months in the United States, will be able to find the bite of the original series which, if it was far from the masterpiece, at least had the merit of never bore us with its twists and its revelations in spades. And as we already know that Georgina Sparks (Michelle Trachtenberg) will make a comeback in these episodes, we say to ourselves that there is still hope.
We caught up with the reboot team: