The biggest HBO Max original drama to-date is coming back for another round. Gossip Girl, the reboot of the CW series of the same name, has been a stellar performer for HBO Max so far this year. Its first six episodes delivered the best drama launch for HBO Max so far, with the back-half of the first season set to arrive in November. Despite the first season not being finished quite yet, HBO Max is comfortable bringing Gossip Girl back for another year. On Thursday morning, the streamer announced that Gossip Girl had officially been renewed for Season 2.
Joshua Safran, who wrote and executive produced the original Gossip Girl series, developed the reboot for HBO Max and serves as showrunner. This new take on the show returns to the Upper East Side to deal with different wealthy private school kids living in the media age. The series is based on the bestselling novels by Cecily von Ziegesar. Original Gossip Girl developers Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage serve as executive producers on the reboot.
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The first season of Gossip Girl stars Jordan Alexander, Eli Brown, Thomas Doherty, Tavi Gevinson, Emily Alyn Lind, Evan Mock, Zion Moreno, Whitney Peak, Savannah Lee Smith, Todd Almond, Adam Chanler-Berat, Johnathan Fernandez, and Jason Gotay.
This new take on Gossip Girl kicked things off with a monumental twist in the first half of its series premiere, revealing who was behind the Gossip Girl account right away. This time, it’s the teachers who are running the account, as they’ve become fed up with the behavior of the privileged students.
“I have friends who work in the private schools of the Upper East Side and Upper West Side,”Safran told Variety after the new series debuted this summer. “And I went to one, obviously. I often thought since the first Gossip Girl ended that there was maybe a show in teachers at these rarefied schools, but I never landed on anything. And then I was talking to my friends a couple of years ago, just about the small changes that they had noticed in the students’ parents in the years they were teaching there.
“I can’t remember whether I first knew that there would be teachers and a teacher would be Gossip Girl, or whether I knew first that I would know who Gossip Girl was and it would be a teacher,” the creator continued. “The two were so neck-and-neck for me. I was also very interested in looking at roads we hadn’t explored the first time around, and teachers — that was a whole area. Especially private school teachers who are younger than public school teachers, who make less money than public school teachers, who come out of college and are not so removed from the age of the students that they’re teaching. All of that combined just felt like really fertile territory.”
Are you excited for more Gossip Girl? What do you think of the reboot so far? Let us know in the comments!
Gossip Girl returns to HBO Max with the second half of its first season in November.
