The show is smart in showing how the ultra-rich perform virtue for the hoi polloi—dredging up old social posts strictly to punish someone under a woke smokescreen (wokescreen?), turning the party designed solely to spite someone into a fundraiser, denouncing bullying immediately after bullying the shit out of someone, and so on. These kids learn about privilege, cancel culture, et cetera only because they can use it to their advantage. For people who were worried Gossip Girl would be humanizing its characters by making them more socially aware than their predecessors, you can stop worrying. It’s just given them a new set of weapons.

I reviewed this week’s episode of the new Gossip Girl for Decider.

Full frontal male nudity! Enthusiastic same-sex make-outs! Underage analingus! Folks, this is not your father’s Gossip Girl! Unless your father is extremely rich and sending you to an elite private school in Manhattan, in which case I suppose it’s very much your father’s Gossip Girl. I wouldn’t let him watch it, though!

I reviewed episode three of the new Gossip Girl for Decider.

Spotted: Gossip Girl changing the parameters of its own show. According to the traditional Kristen Bell voiceover narration that opens each episode, GGv2.0 is now about “the scandalous lives of New York’s elite,” rather than the previous iteration’s focus on Manhattan specifically. Congratulations to Brooklyn, I guess? And maybe Queens, depending on the neighborhood?

I reviewed this week’s episode of Gossip Girl for Decider.

Full disclosure: I watched every single episode of the original Gossip Girl, from the pilot to the finale. I loved pretty much every moment of it, too, the climactic and nonsensical revelation of Gossip Girl’s secret identity aside. (Seriously, if that’s enough to put you off the scandalous misadventures of Manhattan’s elite, you need to calm down.) I even wrote a fanfic comic about the origin of Chuck Bass, for crying out loud. It was my ideal primetime soap. I am what you might call a Gossip Man.

But that was years ago, and we’re all very different people now than we were then, are we not? So I greeted the news that HBO Max was reviving the show for a sequel series with some trepidation. Without the original characters—to say nothing of the cast, all of whom seemed to have names that sounded even snootier than those of the Upper East Siders they were playing (seriously: Leighton Meester! Taylor Momsen! Chace Crawford! Ed Westwick! Blake Lively! Penn Badgely!)—and without its original sociopolitical setting, could a revival thrive?

Based on this pilot episode (“Just Another Girl on the MTA”), I’d say the answer may well be yes. Written by series creator Joshua Safran (a veteran of the original version) and directed by music-video ace Karena Evans, it replaces Serena van der Woodsen, Blair Waldorf, Chuck Bass, and the rest of the original group with a new crew of the young and the consequence-free, then uses a simple but twist-filled structure to set up the big-money backstabbing that’s sure to follow.

Spotted: me, covering the new Gossip Girl reboot for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere.