Summary

• The Gossip Girl reboot removed a major element of the original series: the mystery surrounding Gossip Girl's true identity.
• The new Gossip Girl's identity was revealed in the first episode, unlike the original series which waited until the finale for the reveal.
• The reboot lacked the curiosity and intrigue of the original series, which affected its success and audience engagement.

The short-lived Gossip Girl reboot changed one crucial element of the original series that should have never been messed with. Based on the book series of the same name by Cecily von Ziegesar, Gossip Girl follows a group of wealthy, privileged teenagers on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, whose business is put on blast by an anonymous, all-knowing blogger named "Gossip Girl." After a six-season run from 2007 to 2012, Gossip Girl was revived in 2021 by former executive producer Joshua Safran.

There were some key Gossip Girl reboot was canceled after just two seasons. A number of factors contributed to its cancelation, including its failure to live up to the original. This might've been avoided if the reboot hadn't removed a major element of the original show's remise.

The Gossip Girl Reboot Removed The Best Element Of The Original Show

Because they're set in the same universe, the events from the original Gossip Girl are canon in the reboot, including the original Gossip Girl blog. Ten years after Dan Humphrey was exposed as the culprit, Gossip Girl comes back from the dead as an Instagram , but Dan's not running the show this time. The reboot reveals who Gossip Girl is in the very first episode: the teachers.

The teachers' motivations are clear: they feel that their privileged, private school students are too entitled and need to learn some ability, so they put all their underage students' business on blast on a public platform for the world to see. It's pretty extreme, but that's also what made the original Gossip Girl such a hit. The teachers being the ones behind Gossip Girl wasn't the problem, but rather, the failure to withhold this information from the audience.

Identifying the new Gossip Girl to the viewers from the start was a huge departure from the original series, which waited until the series finale for its reveal. The element of mystery surrounding Gossip Girl's true identity was a core part of the original series' appeal. The desire to find out who Gossip Girl was motivated viewers to keep watching, which helped the show establish a loyal and dedicated audience. The reboot suffered because it lacked that same curiosity and intrigue.

The New Gossip Girl Could Have Been Different While Maintaining The Original's Mystery

Letting the audience in on Gossip Girl's identity right away was an attempt to set the Gossip Girl reboot apart from the original series. While speaking about the Gossip Girl reboot's failure, Josh Schwartz, co-creator of the original and executive producer on the reboot, noted that "it was important to Josh Safran...to make it be separate from the original show," which is why the reboot "was telling a story with a different tone and different set of characters, and...had a different approach." However, this desire to set it apart from the original and make it unique didn't have to come at the cost of Gossip Girl's anonymity.

The reboot had already managed to differentiate itself from the original in other ways. By bringing the concept into the 2020s, the new generation of teenagers had completely different slang, wardrobe, and relationships to social media than the original teens. The reboot also prioritized racial diversity and queer representation in its cast of characters and tackled social issues like police brutality and internalized homophobia. The Gossip Girl reboot still could've used an Instagram instead of a blog to keep the social media usage more in line with Gen Z without blowing the secret of Gossip Girl's identity right away.

All seasons of the original Gossip Girl and the reboot are streaming on Max.