‘Gossip Girl’ Tried to Go Back in Time for a Spinoff That Never Happened
Some of the most popular TV shows receive spinoffs for fans who can’t get enough, but it’s the ones that would have been great but never premiered that hurt the most. In this case, it’s Gossip Girl’s highly-rated season two episode called Valley Girls that was in talks of becoming something before being shut down unexpectedly.
It turns out, the series spinoff was meant to go back in time to when Lily was a teenager and making questionable decisions. Unfortunately, plans were shut down before anything could come of it.
The premise of ‘Gossip Girl’
Gossip Girl was The CW’s hit series that followed Upper Eastside elites Serena van der Woodsen, Blair Waldorf, Chuck Bass, and Nate Archibald – with outcasts like Dan Humphrey making a regular appearance.
The show is narrated by an anonymous gossip blogger who has the 4-1-1 on anything and everything to do with the hottest group in New York. She knows every dirty little secret and is more than happy to shed some light on it if it means these elites don’t ‘get away with murder’ just because they’re popular and filthy rich.
The show exposes the most shocking behaviors not only in the teens who seem to never learn from their mistakes but the parents who have been blinded by the unimaginable amount of money in their pocket.
The backdoor pilot for ‘Valley Girls’
Gossip Girl’s season two, episode 24 premiere was actually meant to be the backdoor pilot for the series spinoff Valley Girls — a series that would’ve followed stuck-up Lily as a laid-back and rebellious teenager.
In the episode, there is a series of flashbacks between 1983 and 2009, where viewers get a glimpse of Lily as a teenager in between current clips of her as a mother. It starts with younger Lily telling her father she was expelled from private school and is followed by a No Doubt ‘gig,’ parties with rockers, dreams of making it big, and a lot of fanny packs and big hair.
The episode spirals into Lily getting arrested and going to jail (paralleled to Serena, who was currently in jail as well), where Carol ends up having to sell her car to get Lily out.
The real reason ‘Valley Girls’ never made it past its premiere on ‘Gossip Girl’
Despite Gossip Girl being a huge success at the time of Valley Girls’ debut and the episode being well-received by audiences, the network turned down what could have been an unforgettable spin-off fans didn’t even know they were missing out on.
According to the EW, there was a lot of buzz about The CW wanting a Gossip Girl spin-off following the show’s immense success leading into season two of the series.
Executive producer Stephanie Savage told them at the time, “It would address the question, ‘How did this woman who grew up with all this Upper East Side snobbery once end up in the back of a Nine Inch Nails bus?'” [and with] some weird twists.”
However, the network ended up passing on the series and leaving it behind as a ‘what could’ve been.’ Fortunately for most GG fans, they never even knew about the episode’s initial intentions, so they never had to dwell over not getting to see it to fruition. As the saying goes, “what you don’t know can’t hurt you.”
