It’s Gossip Girl’s world — we’re just living in it! When the reboot of the original CW series hits HBO Max, it may look different, but it will take place in the same universe, cocreators Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage told Us Weekly exclusively.
“It’s the same world. As we get closer, we can kind of roll out details of what exactly is going to be the same and tie us to the original show,” Schwartz told Us at the Television Critics’ Association’s summer press tour day for Nancy Drew. Savage added: “At the end of the first season we jumped five years ahead and Gossip Girl was back, so it was kind of set up that this is an eternal presence that would reinsert at least at some point.”
The original series ran from 2007 to 2012 and starred Blake Lively, Leighton Meester, Penn Badgley, Chace Crawford and Ed Westwick. The creators revealed that they did reach out to the original cast to tell them about the reboot, but have not heard back yet about whether any want to appear in it.
“It’d be very weird to have a full series living between act four and act five,” Savage told reporters after the panel, referencing the time jump in the final season. “But now that that time has passed, we saw what path everyone in our original group were on. So, it could be a lot of fun to bring that into the new show in some way.”
The new series will be on HBO Max, which opens up new opportunities that network television does not.
“I think we’re excited to tell a different version of the story and different levels of restrictions,” Schwartz, who also created The O.C., said. “It won’t be button-pushing just for the sake of just being able to do it. Maybe a couple ‘s–ts’ we’ll throw in there, just because we can. … You never want to do something just because. Luckily, we’re now airing post-Euphoria, so anything we do is tame by comparison.”
As for why now is the right time, the story just works.
“We were approached about doing an O.C. thing a couple years ago, and that just didn’t feel right or like there was a real story to tell there,” he continued. “With Gossip Girl, because of the franchise at the center of it, this presence judging the secrets of the Upper East Side’s most elite young people, that felt like something that lent itself to being updated with a new generation of kids. That technology was essential in the first book, which was very prescient, was in blog culture. We’ve come several lifetimes since. But social media is now more a sense of everybody’s lives, so how do we lean into that and tell that story?”
The Gossip Girl revival does not yet have a premiere date.
