Spotted: A Gossip Girl Reboot at HBO Max
Sightings
B with her mother, arguing in a taxi in front of Takashimaya. N enjoying a joint on the steps of the Met. C buying new school shoes at Barney’s. And a familiar, stylish, eerily bingeable teen night time soap emerging from development at HBO Max. Approximate years since last seen, seven. Could it be? GG is back?!
Yes, Upper East Siders, Gossip Girl is getting a reboot. Deadline reports that a ten episode first season has been ordered straight to series at WarnerMedia’s upcoming streaming app HBO Max (Not familiar? More on that in a moment). Original show creators Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage are back on board as executive producers. Joshua Safran, a writer and executive producer of the first season (as well as show runner for Smash and creator of Priyanka Chopra vehicle Quantico) will take up the reigns of the new series.
Of course, anyone reading between the lines should get by now that, no, the original cast will not automatically be coming back. Details are slim, but the reboot, being a reboot as it is, would likely focus on a new group of privileged young private school kids. That doesn’t rule out the possibilities of cameos from the originals. Though, Leighton Meester, Chance Crawford, and Penn Badgley are all busy with other tv shows at the moment. Blake Lively is, well, Blake Lively. Ed Westwick was accused of rape by three separate women in 2017, though prosecutors never charged him citing lack of evidence.
If the reboot doesn’t seem particularly HBO to you, that’s because it’s not technically HBO. Though it will carry the premium cable channel’s name, behind-the-scenes it’s entertainment mega-corporation WarnerMedia’s attempt to take on Netflix. It won’t only draw from HBO’s library, but from corporate cousins like TNT, TBS, Cartoon Network, and CNN as well.
It’s also where Friends will wind up after it’s taken off Netflix in 2020. A lot of of The CW’s teen-friendly back catalog like Pretty Little Liars will find a home there too. So a Gossip Girl reboot fits right in, all things considered.
The service isn’t expected to launch until the spring of 2020, so there’s still a long way to go for the show to take form. We’re sure, however, that the agent of every teenage actress looking for her big break in Hollywood is already trying to figure out if their client is more a Blair or a Serena.
Note to Joshua Safran, however, if you want to revisit the storyline where Blair and Dan interned at W, we’re open to discussions.
