HBO Max's Gossip Girl revival retains plenty from its predecessor, from the private school chic uniforms to its rich kids behaving very, very badly. One major thing that's different, however, is the fact that unlike the original series, which revealed the identity of the omnipresent blogger in the last 10 minutes of the series finale (it was Dan Humphrey the whole time!) the new Gossip Girl shows its hand in the first 10 minutes of the pilot by revealing the teachers were Gossip Girl.
It starts in the teacher's lounge, where long-suffering educator Kate Keller laments about how mean Manhattan's elite are to her and the rest of the Zara-wearing, subway-hopping teachers are. When a former Constance Billiard student tells Kate and crew about the original Gossip Girl, they decide to resurrect her from the dead in order to scare the students straight. Yep: This time around, the formerly little seen teachers of Constance Billiard are Gossip Girl.
But will it last? It feels impossible for the series to follow Kate and her fellow teachers posting about their students forever. After all, Kate at least pretends to be a fairly noble person, and as we know from The CW's Gossip Girl, it's very easy to lose all self-respect once you're ruining people's lives with rumors and secrets. I mean, Dan could do it (because he was basically a sociopath, a hill I'll die on) but we also never saw him do it until the final episode. It would be pretty weird to watch Kate actively see how her choices affected the students around her...and then just go about her day, without ever having a moral crisis.
Gossip Girl showrunner Joshua Safran hints that Kate may start feeling guilty about what she's doing to the teens. In an interview with E! News, he explained, "The more the series goes on, and the more Kate gets both more connected to the students and more connected to Gossip Girl...it just gets more and more complicated. And I think that there's a — I don't want to say thriller aspect, but it plays in those realms of a black comedy slash thriller, because you're like, 'Kate, don't do that!' But you're also like, 'I know why you're doing that,' and you become complicit. You're now a part of Gossip Girl."
We may be complicit in watching Gossip Girl wreak havoc, but I have to say — it takes a pretty special kind of person to take a photo of a scantily-clad 14-year-old and post it on social media without her consent, which is what Kate and the group of teachers did in just the first episode. I wouldn't do that, and there's really nothing that would send me into a flood of tears more than a teenager insulting my outfit.
My guess? That Kate and crew won't retain their Gossip Girl privileges for very long. That could be very fun — for Kate to create a monster that she ultimately loses control of. Will someone in the teenage crew take the reins, and therefore have unobstructed access into the scandalous lives of New York's elite? That could be very fun — especially if it was someone like new girl Zoya, who already has a reason to want to burn it all down.
Until then...Kate, go to therapy. This isn't healthy.
Images: HBO Max