You know you love it
Hot people doing hot things. That’s how I would sum up the new Gossip Girl reboot series in a sentence. There’s obviously a lot more to it than that (or is there?), but when it comes down to the why of the need to reboot such an iconic series that is so intrinsically tied to the early noughties with its side fringes and belts over t-shirts, it may be just as simple as that.
We revelled in hot people doing hot things in 2007, with Blair and Serena and an anonymous blogger that people cared just enough about to let narrate their lives, and we revel now. It’s 2021 and to be hot, one also has to be woke, one must have a black tile on their Instagram grid and pronouns in their bio, one must be a feminist and an anti-racist and own a Bernie Sanders t-shirt. And these things aren’t a question, they’re all a given. They represent the bar in 2021 for hot celebrity teenagers and super rich influencers; they are the bare minimum. And although these things no doubt should represent the bar, I’m shocked and surprised that in Gossip Girl, the bar is actually met.
Normally the distance between real life and dramatic television feels far and wide, kilometres and miles of progress in which TV never seems to be able to catch up. And this isn’t to say that Gossip Girl, a mainstream commercial enterprise about the super wealthy flaunting about in the Upper East Side of New York City, is especially progressive in a cultural or political sense, but it’s self-aware enough to realise that we want it to be. It hints to woke culture and puts it forth as a prerequisite for any budding Instagram influencer wanting their fifteen minutes of fame. And perhaps the way it presents it shows the holes in the culture itself, the paper-thin intentions that are never backed with the weight of action.
On a different note, the Gossip Girl reboot is incredibly progressive in the realm of time itself. The first episode had the Upper East Siders going back to the literal classroom after a year of “school through boxes” on Zoom, the pandemic a sure thing to have happened in the universe of GG. With a lot of TV that has been written and made during the pandemic, we are now getting to the point in time where this global crisis will be either acknowledged or ignored in all our favourite shows. Much like the rest of us would like to be able to, many shows have chosen to completely ignore the catastrophic virus that sent cities into lockdown and morgues into overload. And that’s fine. Narrative TV exists in different universes to our own. Even if a pandemic is referenced, it will never be quite like the one every non-fiction human being has experienced over the last year and a half. But our gal GG does reference Miss Corona. Ever so subtly, and ever so little, but enough to prompt the consideration that the world of Gossip Girl operates as a reflection of our own.
There has only been three episodes released so far of the Gossip Girl reboot series. We’ve only just met characters, the world has only just been built, the aesthetic only just established. But even so far, I kinda love it. It’s extra and it’s over the top and it’s cheesy and it’s sexy, and at the very least it’s about rich kids looking good with a veil of nostalgia draped over the top. I’m watching the reboot for much of the same reasons I watched the original: it’s the kind of hot drama we all wish we had a little more of in our lives.
So for now, give it a go, love the aesthetics, fawn over the hot people, but until then, you know you love it. xoxo Gossip Girl.
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