‘Gossip Girl’ Creator Says Season 2 is ‘Definitely Messier’ Than Season 1
Word on the street is there’s a new ruler of the Upper East Side, and this new and improved Gossip Girl is taking viewers by storm. After breaking streaming records in 2021 with Season 1 of the reimagined teen drama, Season 2 was quickly greenlit. It’s now one of the most highly anticipated releases for HBO this year — even if details on when to expect the sophomore season are incredibly scant.
Here’s what we do know about the next installment of reconnaissance from your friendly neighborhood GG.
The ‘Gossip Girl’ reboot on HBO Max broke viewing records with Season 1
Over the first weekend of availability in July 2021, the Gossip Girl reboot became HBO’s most-watched original series. Deadline reported that not only did it break records within the HBO sphere, but it also garnered around 15 billion impressions of content on TikTok — not to mention trending on Twitter and other social media platforms.
Enthusiasm for the series stayed strong through the second part of Season 1 in the fall, even though critics only gave it a 36% approval rating across 55 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. Audiences had a much higher 64% approval rating — perhaps not as fresh as it gets on the review site, but still laudable given the breadth of opinions about what the reboot should include.
Creator Joshua Safran promises it will be ‘messier’ than Season 1
In a Twitter Ask Me Anything in late June, creator and showrunner Joshua Safran answered fan questions about the upcoming season. Many of his answers were decidedly cryptic or complete non-answers. At one point, Safran even noted that his inability to give specifics about the run-time, episode count, and even release date of Season 2 was why he’s held off from doing many AMAs related to the hit show.
That said, Safran did provide some teasers for this season. In the Twitter thread he promises more “romantic throuple scenes,” that a follower asked about. He said Monet’s relationship with Camille is “fraught” and said that the soundtrack will have “more disco than you’d expect.”
At one point in the AMA, he said that the cast was about 75% complete with shooting Season 2. The AMA took place on June 22, and production was underway at the beginning of February, per Twitter updates on the Gossip Girl page, which means the second installment is several months in the making. All good things take time, we suppose.
We know any Gossip Girl episode worth its salt will have its fair share of drama — it is the nature of subvert surveillance, after all. In the AMA, Safran practically guaranteed we’ll see more than what we experienced in Season 1. One fan wrote, “Expecting to see some messy stuff so excited!” [sic] to which Safran replied, “This season is DEFINITELY messier.” You heard it here first, followers. Xoxo.
We’re likely to see more original ‘Gossip Girl’ cameos
Another item fans were curious about during the AMA was whether they could expect to see more cameos from the original cast on the CW in HBO’s second season. At one point, Safran answered that there would be “about the same as S1,” though Twitter would have us believe otherwise.
Season 1 had references to some of the adults from the original series and a few Easter eggs thrown in, but we didn’t see the likes of Serena, Blair, Chuck, Dan or Nate or the others who charmed us (or not) from the original series.
In the Twitter sneak peek above, we get a grainy paparazzi-esque shot of a woman who appears to be Georgina Sparks (played by Michelle Trachtenberg in the original series) clapping from a balcony. In a play on words, the words on the video say, “It only takes one spark … to start a fire.” The ominous Twitter caption follows up with, “And I have a feeling that this city is about to burn.”
Given that Georgina wreaked havoc on the lives of her classmates in the original, we can only imagine the drama she might invoke in the reboot, especially since her son Milo (Azhy Robertson) already has a place in the cast. Messy, indeed.
For now, we’ll have to wait until filming wraps to learn more about what to expect — and when to expect it — for Season 2.
