‘Gossip Girl’ Fans Missed a Deep Callback to the Original Show
Gossip Girl has new characters, but it did bring back one for the premiere. Sadly, the scene was subtle enough that fans of the original show probably missed a deep callback. The creator explained the scene where Dan Humphrey (Penn Badgley) and Nate Archibald (Chace Crawford) were mentioned.
‘Gossip Girl’ mentioned Dan and Nate in the premiere
The new show revealed the students of Constance and St. Jude’s are running things. Teachers are getting fired when they complain about their grades. The teachers mentioned that successful people have graduated from the school like Nate. So what went wrong?
They learn from a character who is a teacher that things were different when she was a student because of Gossip Girl. The students were scared and “being held accountable” by the blog. The character also mentioned that Dan was the one who secretly ran the blog. So the teachers decided to bring it back as an Instagram account. The plan is led by Kate Keller (Tavi Gevinson).
It’s an interesting way to bring back Gossip Girl. Now the audience gets to see teachers stalk their students to create the drama-filled posts. The scene had some obvious callbacks by mentioning Dan and Nate, but another one probably went over people’s heads.
‘Gossip Girl’ fans missed a deep callback to the original show
The character who previously attended the school and is now a teacher is named Rebecca. Creator Joshua Safran explained to The Wrap where Rebecca came from.
“It’s such a very deep Easter egg, I assumed that nobody would know,” he said. “Unfortunately, her full name would make you know her if you Googled it. But I couldn’t get her full name in. I tried and I just couldn’t [get the characters to] say, ‘Rebecca Sherman, you went to school here?’ But Rebecca Sherman is the name of the character at the end of season 2 that they briefly think could be Gossip Girl before they think that it is Eric’s boyfriend.”
This would be in the episode, “The Goodbye Gossip Girl.” Blair Waldorf (Leighton Meester) shuts down the theory that Rebecca is behind the account because she was always studying and wouldn’t have time to be Gossip Girl.
There might be more odd callbacks this season
The original characters won’t appear in this first season. But Safran previously told The Daily Beast that there will be other types of cameos.
“We made a decision early on,” Safran said. “And I was nervous about this decision, but definitely came to believe it was right—that the audience would never accept these characters if they were in the shadow of the original characters.”
He later said, “There are some cameos in season 1 from people on the original show, but not the series regulars.” Fans will have to keep paying close attention in order so they won’t miss them.
