Season 2 of HBO’s Gossip Girl Lost the Premise

Season two of HBO’s Gossip Girl recently came to an abrupt end, as HBO Max announced the show’s cancellation a week prior to the season finale airing. This was shocking news, considering the second season had rave reviews from critics, namely from the AV Club and Paste Magazine. The second season even obtained a 90% score on Rotten Tomatoes, a step up from the first season’s 38%.

Where did the second season go wrong? Despite the positive reviews, I seem to be in the minority who agree that the first season was more favourable than the second. Season one managed to capture the essence of the original show while catering to Gen Z. Though I found Gossip Girl’s new identity ludicrous, her integration within the plot made it worth watching. Yet, in the second season, some writers scrolled too far down TikTok and lost the premise of the show.

Season two brought us into the character’s fears. Julien’s family falls apart, Zoya craves danger, and Audrey, Aki, and Max are insecure in their relationship. The writer took these characters’ intriguing problems and blew them up with eccentric unnecessary plots. This is especially true for the Julien vs. Gossip Girl arc.

The problem first lies in the writing. The revival can’t seem to decide who its audience is. Constant references to Blair and Serena cater to fans of the original show who might not even be watching. Reviving Michelle Trachtenberg’s character, Georgina Sparks, was an aimless addition to the plot. The show is also attempting to cater to the young Gen Z Euphoria watcher, someone who wants to watch overly sexual high school teenagers in situations they’re way too young for. With two demographics, Gossip Girl struggles to meet them in the middle.

The overlooked audience trickled down and poisoned the central plot: Gossip Girl is run by the teachers. Despite having worked on the original show, the reboot’s creators, Joshua Safran and Stephanie Savage, seem to have misunderstood the baseline attraction to the original show: Who is Gossip Girl?

Paired with the obvious acting from the teachers, revealing Gossip Girl’s identity in the first episode was a huge mistake. This plotline resulted in one of my most hated television characters: Kate Keller. Convincing your audience to like a pathetic and insecure teacher who decides to teach her self-centred students a lesson by exposing them on social media, was not an easy task. Unfortunately, they failed.

Gen Z is painted as disrespectful towards their superiors and has the right to claim the world as theirs. In the original show, the teenagers fought their bad reputations to gain respect and not embarrass their families. Now, reputations are everything these kids desire, and more. In the world of the 2007 Gossip Girl, the character’s behaviour was presented as normal for any teenager in New York City. The reboot, however, plays their behaviour and club outings as something only people of their status can get away with. In real life, influencers are objects of desire, even if we’re aware of the fake life they portray on social media. Unfortunately, Gossip Girl is far too removed from reality for us to empathize with these power-hungry 15-year-olds.

Gossip Girl has always been a show about bad people doing bad things. More precisely, affluent high schoolers who use their parent’s status and money to give off the illusion of power. The thing is, their controlling parents and young age made their behaviour seem abnormal in their world. Yet, in the reboot, the kids are free agents while the adults are hot messes. No one is there to put them in order and Kate Keller’s pathetic motive to pose as Gossip Girl doesn’t pass as an authority figure. Audiences cannot immerse themselves in a world with such a ridiculous plot motivated by much too obvious fictional teenagers with fictional problems. Getting “cancelled”, a problem Julien must deal with throughout the series, is a fake world problem.

As each episode ended on a happy note with a rounded-up minor plot, I kept asking myself what was going on. My love for the first season kept me watching for the drama, but I felt as though the writers needed to be brought back down to Earth. Though the show was cancelled, season three’s direction seemed promising and I hope the show will be picked up by another service for us to see its redemption arc.