Review: The 'Gossip Girl' sequel keeps Kristen Bell as narrator but replaces the rest of its original whitewashed, cisgender characters with a more diverse crew of Upper East Side elites
Constance Billard School—Upper East Side academy of social-media influence, nonbinary sexual athleticism and bile—boasts a number of prominent alumni. Caroline Kennedy. The novelist Colson Whitehead. Supreme Court Justice Byron White. And Nate Archibald, whom one might presume to mean the former point guard and NBA Hall of Famer. One would be wrong.
The Nate Archibald cited in the newly rebooted “Gossip Girl”—as those in the know will know—was one of the more prominent characters in the original, which ran on the CW from 2007-12 and was a high-school soap with a new-media spin: The eponymous, anonymous narrator was a social tattler with a blog that kept tabs on the ornate goings-on at Constance and served as its Proustian Page Six. Or, as someone in the new show “remembers,” an “Orwellian Big Sister.
The revamped “GG,” with Ms. Bell’s voice returning omnisciently, cross-pollinates the show’s history with real history and people. It cites Hannah Horvath as a literary reference. It frames the online prose stylings of certain characters in a comparative-lit context . One father recalls Alec Baldwin confiscating his cellphone on Parent-Teacher Night and not giving it back. The show straddles true and false as if it were astride a slippery English saddle.
Nate “Tiny” Archibald would not have fit in among the alabaster-hued student body of the original show, but that’s one thing about the reboot that’s changed for the better; both female leads are Black, for one thing. Less uplifting will be the level of debauchery and lack of visible education portrayed here. Homework? It takes a back seat to alcohol-and-ecstasy-fueled soirees in Dumbo and pyrotechnical fashion shows at the Park Avenue Armory aplenty.
The Queen Bee of Constance is Julien Calloway who, abetted by venomous sidekicks Luna La and Monet de Haan , maintains a social stranglehold on a school where grades are manipulated and teachers are terrorized. The staff is impotent because the true lesson of Constance Billard is that education is unnecessary when you come from extreme wealth .
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