Gossip Girl Reboot’s Shocking Reveal Explained by Series Creator

Thursday morning brought the long-awaited return of Gossip Girl, as the reboot of the popular series made its debut on HBO Max. This version of the show takes place in the modern day and follows a different group of private school students, but there is still a Gossip Girl (narrated again by Kristen Bell), dishing all of the secrets publicly. In the original series, the identity of the Gossip Girl blog writer was a mystery until the very end, when it was revealed that Dan was behind the account. The reboot, however, unveils the identity of the Gossip Girl in a matter of minutes.

WARNING: This article contains major spoilers for the Gossip Girl reboot. Continue reading at your own risk…

This version of the Gossip Girl is an Instagram account, rather than a blog, and it isn’t being run by one of the students this time. The teachers at the school the main characters attend are the ones behind the account in the Gossip Girl reboot. The teachers want to take the power back from the spoiled students and their rich parents, so they create a monster all their own.

Joshua Safran, an executive producer of the original series and creator of the reboot, spoke with Variety about the shocking identity of the new Gossip Girl, and where the idea for twist initially came from.

“I have friends who work in the private schools of the Upper East Side and Upper West Side. 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,” Safran explained. “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.”

What do you think of the new twist on Gossip Girl? Will you be keeping up with the HBO Max reboot? Let us know in the comments!