Spotted: Brooklyn writer (me) shaking her head and saying, “No, no, no, no, nooo,” after reading the news that there may or may not be a Gossip Girl reboot or reunion. Mark Pedowitz, the president the CW, told reporters on Thursday that there is currently a “discussion” at the network — which the show originally aired on — about its somehow reviving the iconic TV show that spawned years of headbands and colorful tights. Exciting as this news may be for some fans of what New York once dubbed the “most important show of our time,” others (or at least, I) stand firmly against this idea.
Gossip Girl, for all its flaws, is still a sort of perfection. Its usually funny, often cruel narrator (voiced by Kristen Bell, but who it turns out is also … Dan?) took us behind the scenes of the world of the Upper East Side’s teenage elite, full of entitled kids with far too little adult supervision and far too many Machiavellian plots. There were drugs and sex and amazing clothes, as well as horrible characters we somehow wound up rooting for. (Why do I want the evil Georgina to be happy?) And what other six seasons of TV could have included plot lines involving:
• Embezzlement
• Limo sex
• A murder confession for a death that turned out to not be a murder
• A fictional take on the real-life Chappaquiddick incident
• Anonymous blogging
• Penn Badgley being creepy (but not as creepy as he is on You)
• A billionaire returning from the (fake) dead
• A royal wedding
Of course, a “reboot” would presumably involve different plots — perhaps a new Gossip Girl would tweet, or maybe TikTok about their Manhattan private-school experience. This could be fun and might help those of us who once considered the original series’ flip phones and mass text messages high-tech actually understand how teens today communicate. But a reunion would be disastrous.
All of Gossip Girls’s story lines had been so neatly wrapped up in the finale (other than that of Rufus and Lily’s love child, Scott — what happened to him?), that there’s no real need to go back and unravel all the drama. While it might be interesting to see how the show’s writers would address what we all recognize now as Chuck Bass’s predatory behavior from early in the first season — as well the sexual assault allegations Ed Westwick, the actor who played Bass, faces — I have yet to see a TV “reunion” special that isn’t so cheesy that it hasn’t made me like the original less.
So please, CW execs, let my beloved Gossip Girl live forever in perfection on the steps of the Met in the mid-aughts – where it belongs.
