Welcome to New York's Upper East Side, where the wealthy and connected mingle at benefits and try to deal with their always-dramatic love lives, not to mention picking colleges. Blair Waldorf is the so-called toast of adolescence in her world; she and her friends, Kati Farkas and Isabel Coates, go to a prep school and fancy parties with their rich parents. Blair is envied by her adversaries because she is thought to have the perfect life, not just because of her gorgeous boyfriend, Nate Archibald, but because she's also planning on getting into her dream college, Yale. With everyone worried about college(or procrastinating on worrying, which everyone seems to be doing), and junior year dragging along, her seemingly perfect life is interrupted by her ex-best friend, the beautiful Serena van der Woodsen, coming back into town after getting kicked out of boarding school. Serena comes back into her life, and into the eyes of Blair's boy friend. When everything Blair knows starts to fall apart, everyone will realize that her life is far from perfect. Will life in the the Upper East Side redeem itself of what it's really supposed to be? Or will the false facade reveal that the rich have the same problems as the not so rich (Jenny and Dan Humphrey), if not more. And just maybe Jenny and Dan are all the more happy with their simple, not-so-expectant lives.
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For all six seasons, the anonymous voice narrating everyone's scandals belonged to Kristen Bell, who never appeared on screen and was never credited as a main cast member despite basically being the show's guiding presence.
Author Cecily von Ziegesar dreamed up the Gossip Girl world while working a day job at Alloy Entertainment, a book-packaging company. The novels hit the top of the New York Times bestseller list back in 2002, a full five years before the TV show ever aired.
Constance Billard, the fictional private school Blair and Serena attend, is a exaggerated stand-in for Nightingale-Bamford, the real Manhattan school Cecily von Ziegesar herself attended as a teenager. A lot of the show's rich-kid drama was apparently pulled straight from her own school days.
Taylor Momsen has said leaving the show in season four wasn't a hard call emotionally, just a legal headache. She was locked into a contract with Warner Bros. and The CW, and once they wouldn't release her, she went straight to showrunners Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage and basically asked them to write her out so she could focus on her band, The Pretty Reckless.
Around the time Jenny Humphrey's storyline was winding down, Project Runway host Tim Gunn, who guest starred on the show, told E! News he found Taylor Momsen glued to her Blackberry and unprepared on set, which only added fuel to rumors she'd been fired rather than having chosen to leave.
Showrunner Joshua Safran has been pretty clear that the 2021 series isn't a reboot in the sense of recasting Blair and Serena's younger years. It's set in the same continuity as the original and can reference or bring back old characters, more like a Marvel-style shared universe than a straight remake.
In the HBO Max version, Gossip Girl isn't a mysterious teenager at all. It's revived by a group of teachers at Constance Billard, led by Kate Keller, who use it to keep their entitled students in check.
Sharp-eyed fans spotted a subtle easter egg tucked into Kate Keller's very first scenes in the reboot's premiere that hinted she was more tied to Gossip Girl than she initially let on, well before the reveal played out.
The original's opening line called Gossip Girl your source into the 'scandalous lives' of Manhattan's elite. The reboot deliberately swapped that to 'scandalous lies,' a small tweak the writers say was meant to reflect a more skeptical, social-media-soaked generation of teens.
The original series dragged its central mystery out for six whole seasons, but showrunner Josh Safran chose to reveal who was behind the reboot's Gossip Girl account early on, wanting it clear from the jump that this version wasn't trying to replay the same guessing game.
