Same to me, I remember the community post and I was like “ i gotta look this up”, cause , yknow, even though i didn’t watch the first season, the ads for it were *everywhere*
The one positive I will give this show is....it was nice to see hair & makeup done right on black women. Nothing more annoying than seeing black female characters on a teen drama with the worst hair & makeup *cough* Bonnie *cough*
I agree wholeheartedly. The hair, makeup and clothing is amazing on the show especially for the black actresses but it is a shame that the show is god awful.
agree because of Zoya, but partly disagree because of Monet her wigs sometimes seemed a little off, which is not ideal if we're supposed to believe she's a rich New Yorker with access to the best hair stylists. and Monet was my fav character, so I felt like this was another mistreatment of her along with not giving her a bigger part aside from that they all looked absolutely amazing though
Honestly just wish they explored and focused more on the petty, narcissistic, pointless and unnecessary drama that rich kids with nothing but time, money and raging hormones experience in the prime of their high school reign...
@@AbisexualCarpenter but that's the plot of original gossip girl...including the death plot part...I am so sorry if I'm not getting the joke but I am confused lol
I disagree. It makes sense. 1.) Not to bash the others, but with the exception of Blake Lively, Penn Badgely is the only actor with the acting range to pull off being Gossip Girl. 2.) He’s not from the same rich and upper class world. 3.) Gossip Girl is harsher on Serena than the others, also more focused on her. Just like Dan. 4.) The end of episode 1 teases it.
@@pinkblossoms Dan being Gossip Girl would be absolutely fine if there weren't several points where Dan finds out information that is BRAND NEW to him from Gossip Girl over the seasons. It seems like maybe they toyed with the idea of Dan being GG but then never really committed to it. By the time the show ended and the way the character developed it made no sense.
@@marcellakilgarriff exactly. And the fact that Serena ends up with him lol, idky but it just doesn't sit right with me that GG was harsher on Serena compared to anyone else and actually caused her trauma to the point where she tried to catch GG redhanded but then she let it all go and forgave everything because GG was Dan and ended up marrying him.
The original GG was like a teenage "Dynasty" for the new millennium. People didn't watch 80's nighttime soaps for the moral posturing. Just the opposite. They watched for the fashion and the b*tch slapping. ☺️
100%. That’s why the original did so well. It didn’t take itself too seriously and wasn’t focused so much on politics, people want shows as a way to escape, even if just for an hour, not another show where politics is shoved down their throats.
@scarleigh6849 exactly. I did not need a morality lesson from the cast of gossip girl. It tried so hard to shove every current event down the viewers' throats, and in a shallow way, too!
The people behind the scenes who did the make up, hair, wardrobe and set design most definitely deserve to move on to better shows. That part of the show was done extremely well.
I've hears a lot of good FSN burns but calling Julian "the narrative equivalent of being stuck in traffic" is top-notch and it's going in my personal list of favorite insults
My favorite is still "If you defend this show, you have shitty taste. That makes you very annoying. I bet that your friends talk shit about you behind your back!" from the first Gossip Girl 2021 video🤣🤣
You're SO REAL for calling out the show's disingenuous politics. Even as a devoted liberal who agrees with all the views presented in here, the show's constant surface level pandering made me want to shove my head through a wall. It's treating the audience like morons.
@@jasmim6612 It's a bunch of adults scrolling through young people's social media thinking this is what you want because this is what yall talk about all of time. When the og Gossip Girl came out, celebrity gossip in tabloids, TMZ, and reality shows were the main public conversations at the time. You can see that was the driving force in the writing.
@@lisettes.9598 Exactly. This can be so confusing. I wouldn't consider myself (nor be considered) a liberal but I'm surrounded by them and, especially in social media, teenagers and young adults act a lot like they're represented in these shows. And then they watch themselves and don't like what they see, even when they admit that that's their politics, that those are their views, and when they probably are okay with or even where there shaming people for playing Hogwarts Legacy a couple of weeks ago (like Zoya would). And it's not like there hasn't been shows with "problematic", "toxic" characters (which is what OG GG characters would be called these days) lately. Look at Euphoria, for instance. I love most of the characters and that definitively includes Nate, which I find super interesting to watch and study. I've lost count of how many times I've been "called out" for admitting that. Would people be allowed to find Chuck and even Blair entertaining to watch these days? I'm doubtful. So characters like Julien is what we get and I don't get why everyone gets all "surprised Pikachu face" about it. I love Friendly Space Ninja and his videos and I probably agree with 90% of what he said here, but the thing is he never really comes up with a good alternative for how things should be. He tells us what he would have liked to see more but that doesn't mean that that would work with the general audience. I think that in terms of social-political views we think somewhat similarly but sometimes I think he doesn't understand that he's not "woke" enough and that his ideas would end up being too controversial for the show's own good. In conclusion, I guess there's no conclusion. I just don't know what's gonna make teen dramas good again because ALL OF THEM seem worried to present their liberal, progressive views to some extent and even when they seem to try to be subtle, at multiple points you'll feel like an idiot being pandered to or an idiot for not really being the audience the show is trying to pander to.
If they wanted to do something neat with this version I think they could have made the show about rich people and their performative activism. The kids are still assholes but they want people to think they are good people because they know it’s detrimental to their social media brand. They cultivate this image online of being the “good” rich person but then gossip girl comes along and starts calling them out on their hypocritical shit. It could have really dug into the issues of reality vs social media and the toxicity of influencer culture.
@@b0bduncan they need to commit to it though. They could make it funny and kinda parody celebrities like Kendal Jenner and the woke Pepsi ad thing. It could have been hilarious. Or they could have gone kinda like The Boys where they show these kids as being heroes and SJW but behind the scenes you never feel safe and you never know where you stand and they harness all their money and power to silence people and destroy them. Then one day this mysterious Twitter account called gossip girl comes out of nowhere and starts revealing secrets that no one but the inner circle knows so now they are scrambling to keep their hero image intact while also trying to find and destroy gossip girl. All the friends turn against each other and start pulling moves to backstab other members of the group in attempts to find gossip girl and stop the leak. You could build tension because no one knows who they can trust. Go all in with full on psychological warfare. You could still have the teacher be the villain but maybe the teacher got fired because of these students and she just wants to destroy them and they hack the students social media accounts and find out these students’ secrets. So they post tidbits of info on these students strategically and maybe reach out to other victims of these rich kids and tell their stories in a kind of #metoo type movement where they expose these kids and their families in an act of revenge. But then they get too power hungry and things spiral.
Yeah, she seems to be written like the worst version of a boomer's experience of their progressive kid or grandkid's expressing their opinions when the boomer doesn't agree
Nah, she is writen like the petulant arrogant selfabsorbed kids that think they know better because they read about x subject on the internet. She literally remind me of this kid that wanted to convice his parents that socialism was better. Parents that escaped poland during the soviet era who saw their family die during a socialism regime. I say she was written flawlesly in that regard.
It was so cool in the original because watching Serena as the It Girl turned into watching Blake Lively become the It Girl in real life. The reboot really makes you realize how talented and charismatic Blake, Leighton, Penn, Ed, etc. really were. And the chemistry they shared really was lightning in a bottle. It is interesting to see that it’s not just “throw new sexy people together and it will be the same.” Gossip Girl OG really was special.
True , even during the more repetitive or boring plots, the OG cast could carry the show thanks to their charisma and chemistry. But with the reboot, I barely believe most of them are friends
It’s curious to me how Tavi Gevinson was known for being a kid prodigy It Girl way before this show, which to me points to them casting her in this role for exactly that reason, but then they failed to make anything worthwhile with her character. While the original has cemented so many of their cast as Fashion Icons this show managed to make someone who was already a Fashion Icon look as bland as possible.
And with social media being what’s now, all the flex culture and obscene showcases of wealth the show could be amazing! Like Crazy Rich Asians but with teenager pettiness in the mix.
There was some charismatic characters but the show was more focus on Zola and Julien drama. I didnt like the whole story of them being half sisters through their mother. For season 2 they change it but still it was pretty boring.
@@BlueBlazeKing plus not all of the characters were rich. Dan was struggling to fit in and you see that with Jenny. The characters were fully dynamic because Blair wasn't just evil all the time, she can be soft while Serena was more soft and could be like Blair in a heartbeat. This show gives one personality and they run with just that
Max actually has a decent and very tragic arc from beginning to end. He starts out as a Chuck Bass clone but grows into a pretty kind and selfless person through being shown love by Audrey and Aki, only to then find out that he was more of an experiment for them than a real part of their relationship.
@@BooksRebound as he said the person playing Max is a good actor, he has alot of charisma, and it’s kinda funny how his character has so much charisma, but Aki is just the polar opposite of his character (I think that’s why they gave Aki pink hair), in terms of duality it does work, but Aki doesn’t really grow as a character and shows that he is ultimately out of place when it comes to the couple, and maybe some of it is due to Max constantly upstaging him, in terms of charisma, etc, then again it could be due to Aki’s voice, because they say that deeper voices (like Max) people tend to like more / give more credit to
You wanna know why it REALLY failed? Because Josh Schwartz wasn't the main showrunner this time around. Josh Schwartz created The OC, arguably the best teen drama of all time, and when that show ended he went to work on Gossip Girl. However he got the opportunity to work on his dream project "Chuck" so he sorta handed over the reins to his work partner Stephanie Savage and she and Joshua Safran took over AFTER season 1 (which is hands down the best season of original GG). Savage is the reason why Chuck Bass became essentially the lead male after season 1 because she loved his dynamic with Blair. Safran then became the head showrunner around season 4-5 and there's a pretty obvious dip in quality there, Schwartz and Savage return to GG for its final season just to wrap things up. GG (2021) Safran started out as showrunner with no real help from Schwartz or Savage becuase they were only executive producers this time around. It's pretty clear Safran does not know what to do with his characters and had even the original GG been his he'd have sunk that ship too.
@@jamescarr1265season 1 is definitely the best, I enjoyed seasons 2 and 3 although they definitely felt a little sillier than the previous seasons, and we don’t talk about season 4 lol
Im not even mad with its understanding of social media but just the idea of julien being insta famous when all she does is go on live, and her lives are the most boring thing ever Like there are people that get tiktok famous and they always have the most chaotic and funny tiktok lives (look at terri jo/kelon, hes CARRYING the app right now) but even those people arent getting celebrity level famous from just going on live like julien has
yeah, bc original gossip girl was based off a book which was based on reality. the author wrote about her own experiences living among rich teens, bc it always helps to draw from real people. like Julien should have been a Kendall Jenner/Lily Rose type, who's a nepo baby, but thinks she's above it and constantly "checks" her rich friends (a-la Kendall going "everybody's beautiful, nobody needs anything", or her Pepsi commercial) and this time around the writers didn't have a realistic personalities to go off of, they just made up very shallow characters with just surface level characteristics like "social media person", "woke activist", "mean girl w mommy issues", "sex obsessed bisexual" idk maybe the casting really mattered too, because i absolutely believed that Blake Lively is drowning in the sea of men attracted to her and her giggly girly sexy persona. i absolutely believed Leighton as cut-throat over achiever, Chace as a boring pretty guy, Ed as a sleazy rape-y womanizer but here everyone is just annoying, though i would agree that Savannah, Whitney, Zion and Thomas could do better with a better script and character arcs.
Despite the GG reboot being awful, I’m glad that everyone acknowledged that Monet (Smith) and Luna (Moreno) were missed opportunities for amazing storylines and character development!
Luna would been the new Serena and Monet would've been the new Blair. It would of been epic. Josh safran should not be allowed to work on any anymore shows.
I think the "woke" girl could work. Like when celebs act woke in a performative but tone deaf way. But you have to address the hypocrisy and make it funny, not annoying and not the only character trait
What you said, and coupled with popular liberal values promoted SUBTLY. E.g. A female POC is trying to advance her career in an area where the top is dominated by rich white men, but she never expresses dislike for men or Caucasians as groups, and said rich white men aren't made out to be one dimensional villains.
The thing is that the whole unsubtle lampshading of wokeness has been done to death too. Its been done well, its been done poorly and at the end of the day, calling out wokeness is just low hanging fruit. It isnt funny or clever, and most of the time the criticisms either devolve into shallow tory strawmen or on the flipside, they try too hard to play both sides and not come off as conservative to really have fun with the satire. At the end of the day who cares? Young people talk about other things than broad social politics, and a teen drama should be allowed to speak to the lives of teenagers without inserting some outdated 2014 era commentary about "wokeness gone mad" or "white men this and that". Its dull.
right like if gg exposed that she’s performative instead of whatever they did with Zoya, it would’ve been a very good social callout on performative activism and liberal activism as a whole
imo, fake wokeness IS a lowhanging fruit and the writers could’ve gone with that, but they didn’t. which makes it even more frustrating because it was such an easy but engaging plot point that they could’ve done but chose not to.
the OG gossip girl was based on successful books whereas i feel these didnt rely on any source material. its important to note the author of the books went to private high school in nyc and experienced her classmates being wild like that, whereas i wonder what the script writers for the reboot relied on
the georgina scenes kinda made me realize how goofy the tone of the og is in comparison to the new one. There's no shenanigans in the new show. it takes itself so seriously. It was probably hard for the actress to take that larger than life character into this more realistic show.
Regarding Zoya, I’m all for progressive messages in media, but I much prefer them to be conveyed through engaging storylines, rather than a single character that spews out progressive sounding one-liners that only touch the surface
Thank you for pointing this out, it was driving me crazy. I couldn’t figure out what that flat, vaguely garbled delivery reminded me of, but it’s definitely evil Siri.
Weirdly I was far more invested in Audrey's mother's story. What is it like for your social circle and relationships to evaporate after your husband casts you aside for someone else? That was interesting. Sadly, it was kind of dismissed by making her an embarrassing alcoholic.
EXACTLY! These producers don't actually care about social justice issues. They just use diversity as a shield from criticism for bad takes, lazy writing, or both.
Modern film/tv series making - surface, in your face portrayals of social ideas through characters without at least trying to do something believable with it. Same shit has happened with last Silent Hill game demo - it was so painful to watch how they have portrayed suicidal thoughts and depression... Like someone just scrolled through Twitter and used it as a source for how people act when they are depressed. Such practices do more harm than good
The Gossip Girl I would have wanted : Kate, growing up being a fan of the original Gossip Girl, always dreamed of pulling a Dan Humphrey and writing her way into High society, so she starts teaching at the same school as the original cast, and picks on a random group of kids. Except that she quickly realizes that in world of fan and anti fan accounts, no one really cares about a random social media accounts posting weird rumors about people no one cares about. So she starts framing the students into more and more scandalous situations, creating her own drama, and accidentaly stumbles upon an actual secret that links everyone together... now she starts teasing the students, threatening to reveal their shared secret and droping hints here and there. But she soon realizes that she messed with the wrong people and better stay anonymous, because her life is now in danger
I kept saying maybe the teacher being GG aspect could have worked if it was ONLY KATE. I would have made her the “new teacher” starting out at Constance but she’s either a fan of Dan Humphrey (and wants to be a novelist like him) or she could be like an undercover reporter for the spectator. She opens GG with the goal of exposing the headmistress getting bribed by rich parents for her story; but the deeper she gets the worst she the secrets she finds. One being Rafa grooming his students. Also the her exposes the rich parents effects the kids (which the way they react/deal with GG exposing parents causes kids to act out and more news for GG). In either the season 1 finale or 2 premiere I would have Kate get anonymous messages threatening to expose her. This anonymous person also hacks Kates GG account and posts things she doesn’t want when she doesn’t do what the hacker tells her. Maybe by the end she actually gets exposed idk but that’s the only way the teacher aspect could have worked.
The great thing about past teen dramas (other than nostalgia) was that they were startlingly vapid and did not aim to send any messages they just operated on full chaos and didn’t take themselves too seriously the new ones seem to take themselves too seriously and try to fit into what they think a socially conscious gen-z audience would like and it just misses every audience altogether
Gossip girl being the teachers as a collective has lived in my head rent free for what is now years. It contrasts so sharply with the time I offered to put a sticker I designed on a water bottle I was gifting to my sister, a teacher. She grimaced and said, “I don’t want to make my students think I’m too interesting.” I just can’t get past it.
@@nukiesduke6868 buddy, i wanna make this clear to you so you understand how profoundly my sister and I do not agree with your implied sentiment. My anecdote was about how teachers keep most their lives private, even ones who share snippets, and generally not being invested in their students personal lives in turn. Teachers are trying to make their students into empathetic, capable, engaged and curious people. Educating is not indoctrination. I’m sorry the education system failed to teach you curiosity and empathy, as well as reading comprehension. But please take your “anti woke” nonsense elsewhere.
This show was soooo aesthetic and beautiful to look at. That was it. It’s only redeeming quality. The kids were so pretty. The fashion was perfect. Black folks looking AMAZING. But the writing deserved the bin.
they were too focused on diversity and thinking if we put this then ppl will watch. Tired of shows thinking if they just put a black person in the show, it's just good enough, why not have good writing and diversity? I think it's an excuse to say "yeah we tried and it didn't work"
Finally someone mentions the fact the some of the main characters who have been friends since they were kids hadn't interacted with eachother ever in the show, it always bothered me😩
The problem with this show is something that Camille de Haan pointed in the second season, she was talking to her daughter Monet but it can perfectly be applied to the show in general: The show put more effort into how it looks: Decorations, locations, costumes than in the quality of writing: the plots,storylines, the characters, etc, etc. And that is the main reason why it is unlikely that currently some streaming giant wants to acquire it, it costs a lot of money and it is really not worth investing so much in an empty product. It’s really sad because I really loved the show, specially characters as Monet, Camille, Luna…
you know what is sad though? it looks good but also is extremely unmemorable. Like you can find entire recreations of blair and serena's apartment online for like the sims, but for some reason the only location I remember for gg 2021 is the green bathroom in school. People pay hundreds of dollars to recreate blair's outfits for season one, and her wedding dress made an entire generation adore elie saab, AND YET 2021 dresses audrey twice in the same dress in different colours? bc they couldn't be bothered to find something else that fit i guess? it so sad.
Og GG had the same problem esp with later seasons. It wasn't exceptional writing and the plot was stretched out. I tuned and finished the season in hindsight because of the fantastic wardrobe and the good looking cast plus bc of attachment to first and second season. Maybe you're a viewer of the og who grew up on GG and now watching the reboot. You're older now and that's how you see through the glitz and glam and see the horrible writing.
You know, I'm normally terrible at recognizing bad acting (combination of autism and just not watching a ton of stuff). Georgina's line delivery made me raise an eyebrow in real life
Add someone who had not seen even one episode of this remake, the actress who plays Luna is the one who strikes me as the most realistic person to pay the "biggest influencer in New York." She has a real screen presence, and I could totally see her appearing on everyone's Instagram feed. I wish they'd chosen her instead of the kind of milquetoast main character, who just doesn't strike me as iconic like Luna does.
yes! Julien is too mousy and obsessed with feeling guilty! It's written all over her body language! Definitely not IT girl material, atleast not as she was being portrayed
I haven't watched Gossip Girl but I have this weird feeling that the Audrey, Aki, and Max trio was an attempt of recreating Elite's Carla, Polo, and Christian trio, but in a less entertaining way.
OHH, tea! Yeah you're probably right. It's the only reason I watched the show honestly. A throuple always gets me interested. I love a love triangle. A REAL love triangle. What people call love triangles are actually just Love Vs, because there's no line connecting the two love interests to each other. And actually poly relationship or a triangle where everyone is interested in everyone is always entertaining
Never watched Gossip Girl, but I did watch Riverdale. One thing to say about Riverdale is that they did solve their original mystery. 😂 Edit: They did kinda solve it. But then went back and added so many more layers to the point that there was no solution. Riverdale was convoluted too. But the central mystery was solved and they never really made that more convoluted.
the only way i can understand Julian being the “it girl” of the gossip girl social media world with all the followers is bc she’s a nepo baby. her dad is a music producer and she’s rich so people want to look into her life. other than that i can’t understand it
You definitely should have been in the board meeting for the script writers ! I like the idea she was a nepo baby . It would be even if they narrated herself as this confident it-girl but behind the Instagram, we see her experience body dysmorphia and mid anxiety since she’s constantly nit-picked by the public.
This show (and honestly a lot of shows in recent years) can be best described as "All Looks, No Substance". As in, the producers and show-runners will put an excruciating amount of work into the surface-level details (Sets, Outfits, Aesthetics, etc) and little effort into the writing and characterization, aka the core foundation of any piece of work. They seem to think that making the show look as visually appealing as possible will be enough to carry the show and as we've seen, that just isn't enough. You need good characters and writing to carry a show and GG2021 has neither.
Even the aesthetics are BAD. None of them have actual style, their homes have no character, and there’s a weird yellow brown filter on a lot of scenes and everything is dark when they want to show nighttime so you can barely see them. The aesthetics suck.
Joshua Safran really embodies the "lord, grant me the confidence of a mediocre white man" concept. As both an academic and creative writer, I can only hope to one day produce something half as perfect as he THINKS Go Piss Girl 2.0 is.
Is that a line from the show? It sounds exactly like something Zoya would say during one of her racist rants against white people. Maybe you're not giving yourself enough credit here... you would've fit in very well on the writing team. If copy/pasting racist remarks about safe targets isn't mediocre enough to get you that job, then I don't know what is. Just believe in yourself, honey.
You can tell even the actors didn’t do their proper research either. They also admitted in an interview after the 1 season came out that they never even watched the oginal G.G. 🙄which made me even more upset to see how unserious they “all” were
If they hadn’t blown the reveal of who Gossip Girl is they could’ve totally dropped hints and clues on the Instagram accounts they made for the characters! It would’ve been such a cool idea to drop Easter eggs or clues for other points, or even have them commenting on each others pictures to enforce bad or good relationships. Hell! You could’ve had the Gossip Girl account where all the gossip was being shared; like a confessions account! What a damn shame they had little nuggets of good ideas but failed to do absolutely anything with that!
The catfights are especially weird to me because from my experience, girls dont really fight like this. Like in all 18 years of my life, I've seen trivial fights like this 3 times. Girls fight differently now and tbh, having catfights in shows feel a little outdated.
Honestly, I prefer the catfights over topic femininity passive-aggressive propaganda campaigns against other girls (went through the latter during my school years)
I didn't watch the show, but I can feel Luna's charisma even from the clips shown in this review. A true diva over there. So sad she was not the focus of the show.
Watching the snippets of Michele’s performance was painful and I really hope it was the writers’ decision and not hers because I can’t bare to see the Dawn Summers I watched in BTVS become this.
It’s one thing for Joshua Safran to be unaware of Monet’s popularity in the show but honestly it feels like he just hates the fact that she’s so well liked. From his shady tweets about her character, to that whole weird Monet roast compilation, scrapping her out of the show’s final moments and then basically confirming she’d be sidelined if the show got a season 3. He really could have done something with that character because it was clear everyone was only sticking around for her but his ego was too far up to see anything other than the fact that this supposed “minion character” is getting more traction than the main character he’s advocating for that nobody will remember in a year let’s bet.
What? I didn’t know this, I didn’t watch the show but every clip I saw of her on UA-cam was so queen bee that I was entranced. She is literally stunning, the actress is legit probably the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen. I adore Monet’s style and I was rooting for her to take over everything once she realized Julian was not on her level. So you’re telling me the creator of the show doesn’t like her??
I liked the idea of a teacher being Gossip Girl, but it should have been because she was annoyed by the rich people and wanted to get back at them, not to make them better.
I liked the teacher , i Thought it was very clever. I loved how greedy she gets and makes sense it was fun seeing Kate run around , something we never got to see with Dan
it would've been cool if she was a friend or minion of JENNY from the original show (would've allowed her to have ties to Jenny and Dan for her to get the page again) and out of her own spite attack the teens of Constance just her how her and Jenny was treated.
She literally was harassing Julian and Zoya the most, but they were the nicest to the teachers. It was Monet who was mean to Kate, so why was she mostly targeting Julian and Zoya's family? So stupid!
It really does feel like a critical flaw in a lot of ensemble shows, teen or adult, is that they pick the main characters in advance. I feel like, unless they have a very strong sense of plot across seasons (which drama shows almost never do), they should be using the first season to introduce and basically audition main characters. If showrunners are going to be this chronically unable to predict which characters are going to connect with audiences, they should at least have a bit of humility about it.
Gossip Girl was a combination of drama, high society, fashion, and really great casting. I think the tv show went on for so long because the cast had a lot of chemistry and charisma. Also, a lot of the show was about love and friendship, the characters would go to great lengths to help the ones they loved, Blair and Dan especially, and Chuck used his money a lot of times to pamper and take care of Blair. Every season they had some conflict that involved all of them personally or they would come together to help one of them (mainly Serena). They had a lot of conflicts but would always work it out or forgive and get together again. The show wouldn't work if they weren't kind of always together, that's why the college phase of the show was a little weird, they had to make some choices to keep them all in the same place somehow. So I feel like the new GG keeping the characters kind of separate messed up a lot with their potential to build chemistry and charisma through their relationships.
It's kinda weird that they didn't make the one person who hates being rich being the one to lecture everyone on morality. Like, this would be so much more coherent than a bunch of super rich kids who revel in their own wealth and bully TEACHERS but *genuinely* care about changing the world for the better with big bold political moves. Make him call out the hypocrisy of people who posture as politically engaged but are actually completely self-centered
In my mind, I think part of the reason for the spiraling quality of teen drama/ writing in general for most media in recent decades is who it’s coming from. Think about it, most people in Hollywood are fundamentally completely distanced from the people and subjects they write about and are stuck in their bubble of people who have no real problems. There’s a fundamental lack of grounding in their mindset and to worsen the issue, the system is designed to blow their egos out of proportion with a mild amount of success and take it all away once a public failure comes out. Not to mention so many of these people are more privileged than anyone of any background could possibly know, and that reflects in their works. Tldr; more often than not good writing experience comes from experiencing struggle and sacrifice. You get a fundamental understanding of writing themes when you understand them in a deep way. When your biggest problem has always been twitter, well it shows. Edit: a good example of what I mean is puss in boots the last wish, which was actually based on Antonio Bandera’s feelings and real internal crisis about aging.
This is so true; Skins was literally written by people who were British teens so they knew exactly what was up. And thevog GG books were written after research -!thevwriter even said she had to tone some irl stuff down to make it believable
Very true. Unfortunately, it's a vicious circle: making it to Hollywood as an unknown scriptwriter is extremely hard when you don't already have connections in the industry. Hell, submitting any project without at least one famous name involved is useless because, more often than not, it will not be taken seriously, if even funded to begin with. So, of course, such elitism shows in every character. Hollywood doesn't care about realism, about relatablility, or even about quality, as much as it does quantity. It's always been that way.
This makes me think about Jules special episode from Euhporia, which Hunter Schafer helped write and was considered by many people incredibly well written and very well down in its portrayal of trans identity because AN ACTUAL TRANS WOMAN wrote it- and then how when season two of Euphoria came out everyone hates Jules and she seemed out of character. It’s always important to have different point of views in the writing room
Personally I think there's another underlying reason that the GG reboot failed. The original series was heavily based on the YA novels by Cecily von Ziegesar. The reboot, however, was not. What is odd to me though, is that there's actually material for a proper GG sequel, because there's a sequel series to the GG novels following a set of triplets that just moved to the Upper East Side.
This video essay is the first time I’ve heard the dialogue from Georgina in season 2! I saw gifs with subtitles and I imagined her saying these lines like she sounded in the original show… oh boy that was devastating to hear here
Savannah Lee Smith and Zion Moreno are absolutely main character material. They made it work with this show's horrible writing, IMAGINE their power if they were given actually GOOD writing!
I strongly believe Michelle Trachtenberg wasn't willing to make a cameo on GG again but was kindapped and all her lines are delivered via a AI alongside deepfakes to make it believable. She is not the toxic thanos level menace threat mother i know but an impostor.
Nope. She pitched her return. She wanted to return in season 1. My theory is that she is the biggest no name out of the original.who has not a lot going on and so she was desperate for the attention. She is in her own flop era rn
I still think it's so sad that Grand Army got cancelled and didn't even get a wider recognition. For me, it stands separate from the Gossip Girl reboot or something like the live-action Winx show. It Was such a good show. Sure, it was VERY intense and raw, but I felt it was a lot more honest and less cringy than all the other shows. Especially comparing it to 13 reasons why, it had some similar themes būt developped then SO MUCH BETTER. I am still mad at Netflix for this.
they wanted to have their cake and eat it too with julien, like they kept saying she was the queen bee, the it girl, that she would destroy anyone in her way, but also that people loved her because she was nice, and julien never felt like a real person. Like pick a lane
Interesting that you brought up the show creating social media profiles for the characters - SKAM, a realistic Norwegian teen drama which is one of the only recent shows to make a strong case for good teen dramas, did that first, but it was utilised as an innovative way to tell the story, not a marketing technique. The show was released in small real time online clips - the story would unfold adjacent to viewer's real day to day lives, and therefore made them a lot more invested. The characters Instagrams felt super realistic, mimicked current online trends seamlessly and would provide little teasers, clues and hooks for upcoming clips. Honestly it was so innovative and mf genius.
Monet shoulda been the main character and fleshed out her relationship with her parents and THEN over time in future seasons go through a “redemption arc” of trying to be a better person like how Julian was from the jump. It gives us time to be invested and root for her growth instead of repeating the redundant storyline we got with Julian.
Personally, I think British teen dramas should be the only ones approved from now on. They seem to get everything right about how teenagers work, from their social media, to their interpersonal relationships, to their personalities, their internalised views on society and most of all, they allow them to be played by actors that actually look like imperfect teenagers!
There was never an overarching conflict and the kids’ loyalties and personalities kept flip flopping every other episode. Also they focused so much on the influencer and social media changes in the narratives that they forgot about the actual influence and power and prestige and wealth that these kids had.
Just for funsies, I'm gonna write my own Gossip Girl 2021 fanfic right here. Here's how I would play with these characters: - Since Julian apparently doesn't work as a charming, malicious top influencer, and the actress isn't doing a great job at it either, let's change the character completely: Julian is now a 100% good natured person who just wants to make it big as a model/influencer, but she's also rather weak willed and not ready for how competitive and ruthless this world is. Her arc could be about navigating the unfair world of gossip and fame, even becoming a darker version of herself at some point, eventually learning that she doesn't want to give up on her morals and her kind nature just to become famous and make money - Zoya is still a bad excuse of a social justice warrior, but now she's PURPOSELY pedantic and annoying, to the point where it's clear that people around her barely can stand her: she may have really good intentions, but she's going about it the wrong way, and she doesn't realize it, making her frustrated at how little she's being heard. Meanwhile she's also jealous that her sister is becoming famous through modeling/Instagram, and becomes angrier and angrier about it, which could also be a cool commentary on how the vapid and often toxic world of celebrities usually gets a lot more attention than actual important causes and activism. More on her later - I like that there's a throuple and it's actually really easy to solve the issue of their writing: them getting together needs to be a lot more gradual. Imagine you find yourself slowly falling in love with two people at the same time, most people's first reaction would be "wait this can't be, I need to choose only one", and so they dance around each other for a very long time before they realize that they feel exactly the same way about each other and just decide to become a polyletionship. Their arc could be all about navigating the difficulties that come from such a bond: dealing with jealousy, with misunderstandings, and with how the people around them react to their relationship, how they fight for their right to be together at all. Also, why only show them naked in back in the middle of afterglow? Let them go on cute dates dammit, I'm always down to showing people in love being intimate on screen, but this is the only instance i can think of of a polyletionship being shown in a big production, so show them being in other situations too! - Since Monet and Luna are clearly the best characters, why not make them the protagonists? Why not revolve the whole show about their relationship? I think it would be cool if the both of them could be the queen bee type, manipulating people around them to gain influence and control, but I also think it would be fun if they weren't simply rivals, but also friends. Two mean girl friends having a competition on who can get to the top first sounds pretty awesome if you ask me. Meanwhile all the issues in their lives presented in the show (what little was shown anyway...) should be expanded upon massively, making them the center of the entire story. Also, you have a trans character? Show the difficulties that come with being transexual in this world dammit, don't be a coward, especially not now when trans people are experiencing massive violence and backlash in general - And maybe it's my little sapphic heart speaking, but... this is MY fanfic, so I think Monet and Luna should eventually get together - But wait, what about Gossip Girl? Well, I think Zoya would actually be a pretty good candidate for it. She could use Gossip Girl as a tool to expose the vanity, the arrogance, the superficiality of the upper class and all the people surrounding her. Maybe for most of the show people could think that GG is actually either Monet or Luna, since in this version they are the most popular and most unhinged characters of all, and maybe at some point even poor Julian could be accused of being the eye watching over them, but no, it was her sister all along, once again living in her shadow. I'm not saying this version would be any better (not with better actors at least...) but I would certainly have a lot of fun writing/watching this.
Yeah this version is 100% better. Monet and Luna should have been who people thought were GG while it was Zoya all along I stead of Zoya and her sister fighting over Obi who has no charisma or personality. Nate might have been boring but at least he was cute, charming and not one dimensional.
I read some of the books and I felt that Vanessa was GG. Zoya would have been a great GG, so entitled, an outsider and bang, she is the one that is exposing everyone online.
About characters having social media like irl for us to follow, the original "Skam" had that and i loved it ❤ I think they executed it really well, teasing us about what would or could happen
I'd say the German remake "Druck" was pretty good at giving all the characters their own personalities and voices on their social media (and SKAMEs!! they were great at it too!!!)
I was looking for this comment, the Instagram profiles in Skam were great and actually worked in favor of the plot. But OG Skam is one of the best teen shows that I have ever watched and I don’t think US could ever do something that great.
@@ninalucy1178 They truly were!! I can't even exactly remember I think they had MySpace profiles for all the main characters? It was that long ago! and also released online-only mini episodes alongside the main show. That was very much not the norm back then, as a teenager at the time I remember thinking it was so cool!
The reboot had soo much potential. But, they were kinda doomed from the start by keeping the same name. They should've called it something else....like, XOXO or something 🤷🏾♀️
i could literally make a whole hours-long video essay on how the GG reboot could be fixed (and i just might lol) but my BIGGEST change would be to make Max, Luna and Monet the main focus of the show rather than Julien, Zoya and Audrey/Aki. Not only are all three of them the ones w the most charisma, but the all have interpersonal issues with friends AND family that could motivate their actions (morally grey as those actions would be). I just hope that these three are somehow on a new project together and whoever is at the front of that project knows exactly what to do with all of their charisma, uniqueness, nerve and talent
Something that i find strange about teen dramas is that, in a lot of them, the main characters almost always end up being unlikeable assholes while the narrative constantly bends over backwards to validate them. I wonder why that keeps happening in these types of shows. I'm not saying this is exclusive to teen dramas, just that i feel is more notorious in this genre.
Right! They write character that is horrible but try so hard to sell them as good souls. Ironically that was the magic of both Blair and Chuck, they were arguably the worst people in lead original cast but they didn't try to act like they arent. They owned it and thrived in it, never one writers tried to force on watchers that they are good people, they werent. But there were SO MANY moments when they actually showed they were good people in their own right, but it wasnt forced to show it... Serena, on the other hand was always forced for people to believe she is the good girl, or at least changed, (but its still worked because she was better than those two, and actually tried sometimes), and I think that is the main reason people prefer Blair to her.
I think one of the main problems will the reboot is the OG series relied on being set in the 2000s like those pre big social media days when you had to go to blogs and random sites online to see what celebrities were up to
The biggest flaws of the reboot is the fact that one, none of the cast had chemistry, two, the characters were boring and a lot of them couldn't act and three, the writers had no idea how to integrate social media and the current environment for teenagers. The writers had plenty of possibilities when it came to writing the new era, especially when you look at the current day influencer. Instead it seems like they just dabbled into it without going all in. The show had potential. It did. But they were so afraid to turn the new cast into extreme personalities. The reason why the original worked is because of Blair. I'm not saying the rest didn't do well, but Blair was the standout and Leighton Meester's performance was the real deal. But let me point out , Gossip Girl was only good for one season and the second season was tolerable. Anything after that. It was a grievance.
finding out that Penn Badgley was in the original gossip girl is the kind of random fact I didn't know I needed to know today, but am glad I found out about.
I ususally do not comment on YT videos, but I want to say that I am INCREDIBLY entertained by your amazing videos. I laughed so hard during your Flash and Riverdale reviews/breakdowns and I feel like they’re very insightful in the context of media studies. Also I LOVE that they’re super long, I love putting on your videos as a sort of podcast and listening to it. Keep up the great work!
The way I was looking for another YT retrospective and was blessed seeing this notification 😭 Thank you for your service and I’ll be listening to this for the first two hours of my WFH shift 🎉
1:07:59 “Nobody wants to see a teacher.” I can’t help but think this was a meta comment Josh put in so he can seem like he’s in on the joke after all the criticism the show got for the teachers being Gossip Girl.
So I never watched this reboot but from the way you were describing the MC at 17:35, it feels like they made Gossip Girl but instead of making someone like Blair or Serena the MC, they made Vanessa the MC. No wonder it flopped. 😂
Oh wow, I never thought of that! 😂 I always assumed (from descriptions) that she was Serena if Serena stayed back and Audrey is Blair if Blair never got ambitious to become a Queen Bee, and Monet is kinda Blair as a kingmaker than a queen or maybe Nelly Yukie of she was ambitious from the get go. I think your take is better, seems like Vanessa, someone who thinks they're good but is selfish and is chaotic.
@@sindhusanthanakrishnan5465 I feel like their chances would have been better if they didn't market the show as a Gossip Girl reboot and instead made it its own show with its own identity. They butchered the Gossip Girl premise anyway. 😂
I first wanted to say how appreciative I am of your videos. I found a few of them and they're really, really great. It made me realize why I haven't been connecting with many new shows. There is no real impact and most are just incredibly boring. It's okay for us to ask for more from television shows.
Only positive thing about this show was that it was so bad it literally made my sister and I go and rewatch the original GossipGirl and we’re having the best time. Sure some of it is dated and cringey but man it’s such a great show we’re on season 4. Trust me if you haven’t watched GG in years or since it first aired I recommend going back and watching. Blair alone is just completely iconic. Also the music is *chefs kiss* I couldn’t get through the first season of the reboot and I sure as hell was not even a bit interested in the second season. There was still so much material from the original books they could’ve used and I’m sure would’ve been waaaaaay more interesting than whatever GG2 was. Just sad really.
28:27 I wouldn't say the original Gossip Girl characters had no humanity, I think that most of their horrible behavior came from somewhere deeper and that's what made them work as characters. They were complex (especially/mostly in S1) and complicated, and frustrating and it was amazing. I wish they at least attempted to do that nowadays in teen shows.
Ok, but real talk, Zoya really seems to have been inspired from woke internet comments, all woke characters seem to be based on internet outrage, producers really think that's what young people want to hear because those are the most vocal among us. So I don't know who is to blame, art immitates life in this case.
I agree wholeheartedly however I feel Zoya needs a character who challenges her “wokeness” and make her think in a more grey area with her very aggressive approach and actually make her a actual character.
Could’ve work if it was a critique of ppl like her who view themselves as morally superior. Or maybe a parody. Like obviously they support the right causes but for the wrong reasons.
I don't know. If you are a writer you know that people are complex. Believing young people are plain just because of what they tweet would be really condescending of them. A good writer investigates what makes their subject matter worth writing about. If you don't respect or care about 2020s teenagers, why write about them?
French version of “skam” the tv show did the instagram profiles with a very cool addition : the tv show was released on UA-cam one clip at a time, then on Friday the full episode: meaning that if something happened Sunday at 10 am, you’d see it on their UA-cam channel at exactly that time + if you followed their instagrams you’ll see a story or a picture or a post that the character would have posted at the same time. I loved that show ❤❤❤
You nailed it. If they had made Luna and Monet the main characters it totally would’ve worked. They are both definitely woke, but like you said, narcissistic as fuck, and they didn’t apologize for it. That’s what the OG gossip girl was. Plus, Monet always gave me Queen bee vibes!
So basically every character could be interesting(Luna, Monte, and Max) in this show is always sidelined for people who isn’t worth it and why Michelle why. Georgiana was a amazing villain in the original.
A lesson to be learned: Be careful to make "spin off's" 10 years later. It's raising certain expectations since GG went on for 6 seasons. The audience who watched GG back in the 2000's were probably in high school or young adults. The now 20-30 year old's may not be interested in newly produced high school drama, and the younger audience might have missed out on the original and have no nostalgia attached to it. The only late spin off that worked for me was Hocus Pocus 2.
Oh my god thank you so much for pointing out that dinner scene cause in 2x02 cause when it came out and I watched it was the moment I realised the show would not change cause of how boring, uninteresting and how desperate they tried to make it funny and it messes with the whole pacing like it was so awful!
I will say, one good things about awful shows like this is that it gives me so much more confidence in my abilities as a writer because I probably could've done a marginally better job with the concept when I was 12
it's news to me that there was more than one season 😬
edit: ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh lol
me
Lmao
Same to me, I remember the community post and I was like “ i gotta look this up”, cause , yknow, even though i didn’t watch the first season, the ads for it were *everywhere*
i just realzied watching the video that I somehow forgot to keep watching, I meant to finish it 😂
@@90eva90 ft j
The one positive I will give this show is....it was nice to see hair & makeup done right on black women. Nothing more annoying than seeing black female characters on a teen drama with the worst hair & makeup *cough* Bonnie *cough*
Smooth
I agree wholeheartedly. The hair, makeup and clothing is amazing on the show especially for the black actresses but it is a shame that the show is god awful.
agree because of Zoya, but partly disagree because of Monet
her wigs sometimes seemed a little off, which is not ideal if we're supposed to believe she's a rich New Yorker with access to the best hair stylists. and Monet was my fav character, so I felt like this was another mistreatment of her along with not giving her a bigger part
aside from that they all looked absolutely amazing though
Oh no, i loved Monet's braids first season but most of her wigs s2 were wiggin a little too much.
OMG!!!! I hadn't even finished reading the sentence and Bonnie's name popped up in my head!
Honestly just wish they explored and focused more on the petty, narcissistic, pointless and unnecessary drama that rich kids with nothing but time, money and raging hormones experience in the prime of their high school reign...
That sounds quite boring imo, throw in a mystery or death please
So, be Gossip Girl, yeah
@@AbisexualCarpenter but that's the plot of original gossip girl...including the death plot part...I am so sorry if I'm not getting the joke but I am confused lol
Or their downfalls and how they crash and burn and become irrelevant in adulthood
the epic highs and lows of high school football
On the plus side, Dan Humphreys being revealed as Gossip Girl is no longer the dumbest Gossip Girl reveal in the GG universe. 😂
ahahahahaha true
I disagree. It makes sense. 1.) Not to bash the others, but with the exception of Blake Lively, Penn Badgely is the only actor with the acting range to pull off being Gossip Girl. 2.) He’s not from the same rich and upper class world. 3.) Gossip Girl is harsher on Serena than the others, also more focused on her. Just like Dan. 4.) The end of episode 1 teases it.
@@pinkblossoms Dan being Gossip Girl would be absolutely fine if there weren't several points where Dan finds out information that is BRAND NEW to him from Gossip Girl over the seasons. It seems like maybe they toyed with the idea of Dan being GG but then never really committed to it. By the time the show ended and the way the character developed it made no sense.
@@marcellakilgarriff exactly. And the fact that Serena ends up with him lol, idky but it just doesn't sit right with me that GG was harsher on Serena compared to anyone else and actually caused her trauma to the point where she tried to catch GG redhanded but then she let it all go and forgave everything because GG was Dan and ended up marrying him.
P
The original GG was like a teenage "Dynasty" for the new millennium. People didn't watch 80's nighttime soaps for the moral posturing. Just the opposite. They watched for the fashion and the b*tch slapping. ☺️
100%. That’s why the original did so well. It didn’t take itself too seriously and wasn’t focused so much on politics, people want shows as a way to escape, even if just for an hour, not another show where politics is shoved down their throats.
@scarleigh6849 exactly. I did not need a morality lesson from the cast of gossip girl. It tried so hard to shove every current event down the viewers' throats, and in a shallow way, too!
I've never seen the orginal gossip girl and now I want too. A teenage dynasty sounds amazing.
The people behind the scenes who did the make up, hair, wardrobe and set design most definitely deserve to move on to better shows. That part of the show was done extremely well.
I've hears a lot of good FSN burns but calling Julian "the narrative equivalent of being stuck in traffic" is top-notch and it's going in my personal list of favorite insults
that and "Referring to Aki as a character is an insult to fiction" LMFAO
My favorite is still "If you defend this show, you have shitty taste. That makes you very annoying. I bet that your friends talk shit about you behind your back!" from the first Gossip Girl 2021 video🤣🤣
What neighborhood did you grow up in that Gossip Girl was such a cultural phenomenon to you lol. That sounds so crazy as a New Yorker.
@@richardnelson26 The rest of the world, I guess.
@@richardnelson26 Some of the worlds population isn’t from New York. Shocking I know. Some of us aren’t from USA. Mind blowing.
You're SO REAL for calling out the show's disingenuous politics. Even as a devoted liberal who agrees with all the views presented in here, the show's constant surface level pandering made me want to shove my head through a wall. It's treating the audience like morons.
A lot of characters do that these days and as a millennial it makes me painfully irritated to watch TV nowadays.
Yes sadly all the shows do this.
@@eatatjoe as a gen z, i'm confused to what they're trying to achieve with all of this. i couldn't finish slocg because of that.
@@jasmim6612 It's a bunch of adults scrolling through young people's social media thinking this is what you want because this is what yall talk about all of time. When the og Gossip Girl came out, celebrity gossip in tabloids, TMZ, and reality shows were the main public conversations at the time. You can see that was the driving force in the writing.
@@lisettes.9598 Exactly. This can be so confusing. I wouldn't consider myself (nor be considered) a liberal but I'm surrounded by them and, especially in social media, teenagers and young adults act a lot like they're represented in these shows. And then they watch themselves and don't like what they see, even when they admit that that's their politics, that those are their views, and when they probably are okay with or even where there shaming people for playing Hogwarts Legacy a couple of weeks ago (like Zoya would). And it's not like there hasn't been shows with "problematic", "toxic" characters (which is what OG GG characters would be called these days) lately. Look at Euphoria, for instance. I love most of the characters and that definitively includes Nate, which I find super interesting to watch and study. I've lost count of how many times I've been "called out" for admitting that. Would people be allowed to find Chuck and even Blair entertaining to watch these days? I'm doubtful. So characters like Julien is what we get and I don't get why everyone gets all "surprised Pikachu face" about it. I love Friendly Space Ninja and his videos and I probably agree with 90% of what he said here, but the thing is he never really comes up with a good alternative for how things should be. He tells us what he would have liked to see more but that doesn't mean that that would work with the general audience. I think that in terms of social-political views we think somewhat similarly but sometimes I think he doesn't understand that he's not "woke" enough and that his ideas would end up being too controversial for the show's own good. In conclusion, I guess there's no conclusion. I just don't know what's gonna make teen dramas good again because ALL OF THEM seem worried to present their liberal, progressive views to some extent and even when they seem to try to be subtle, at multiple points you'll feel like an idiot being pandered to or an idiot for not really being the audience the show is trying to pander to.
If they wanted to do something neat with this version I think they could have made the show about rich people and their performative activism. The kids are still assholes but they want people to think they are good people because they know it’s detrimental to their social media brand. They cultivate this image online of being the “good” rich person but then gossip girl comes along and starts calling them out on their hypocritical shit. It could have really dug into the issues of reality vs social media and the toxicity of influencer culture.
Smart. Petiton for hbo to hire you as the new screenwriter
this was obie’s whole character but they dropped it after an episode
@@b0bduncan they need to commit to it though. They could make it funny and kinda parody celebrities like Kendal Jenner and the woke Pepsi ad thing. It could have been hilarious. Or they could have gone kinda like The Boys where they show these kids as being heroes and SJW but behind the scenes you never feel safe and you never know where you stand and they harness all their money and power to silence people and destroy them. Then one day this mysterious Twitter account called gossip girl comes out of nowhere and starts revealing secrets that no one but the inner circle knows so now they are scrambling to keep their hero image intact while also trying to find and destroy gossip girl. All the friends turn against each other and start pulling moves to backstab other members of the group in attempts to find gossip girl and stop the leak. You could build tension because no one knows who they can trust. Go all in with full on psychological warfare. You could still have the teacher be the villain but maybe the teacher got fired because of these students and she just wants to destroy them and they hack the students social media accounts and find out these students’ secrets. So they post tidbits of info on these students strategically and maybe reach out to other victims of these rich kids and tell their stories in a kind of #metoo type movement where they expose these kids and their families in an act of revenge. But then they get too power hungry and things spiral.
@@llamathedrama1454 I never actually watched gossip girl 2021 but now I kinda want to go and turn my ideas into a kind of fan fix type thing.
@@tegantalks9612 I’d 100% read that
Zoya is literally just the human embodiment of twitter.
Now I imagine her making a notification sound before she speaks as if she was an android set to read tweets..!
Yeah, she seems to be written like the worst version of a boomer's experience of their progressive kid or grandkid's expressing their opinions when the boomer doesn't agree
Nah, she is writen like the petulant arrogant selfabsorbed kids that think they know better because they read about x subject on the internet.
She literally remind me of this kid that wanted to convice his parents that socialism was better.
Parents that escaped poland during the soviet era who saw their family die during a socialism regime.
I say she was written flawlesly in that regard.
Accurate
Bruhhhhhhh excaclyyyy!! Thinking picking fights and arguments is like peak activism lmao
It's actually insane that everyone thinks Monet and Luna should have been the main characters of this show except from its own writer
It was so cool in the original because watching Serena as the It Girl turned into watching Blake Lively become the It Girl in real life. The reboot really makes you realize how talented and charismatic Blake, Leighton, Penn, Ed, etc. really were. And the chemistry they shared really was lightning in a bottle. It is interesting to see that it’s not just “throw new sexy people together and it will be the same.” Gossip Girl OG really was special.
True , even during the more repetitive or boring plots, the OG cast could carry the show thanks to their charisma and chemistry. But with the reboot, I barely believe most of them are friends
It’s curious to me how Tavi Gevinson was known for being a kid prodigy It Girl way before this show, which to me points to them casting her in this role for exactly that reason, but then they failed to make anything worthwhile with her character. While the original has cemented so many of their cast as Fashion Icons this show managed to make someone who was already a Fashion Icon look as bland as possible.
And with social media being what’s now, all the flex culture and obscene showcases of wealth the show could be amazing! Like Crazy Rich Asians but with teenager pettiness in the mix.
There was some charismatic characters but the show was more focus on Zola and Julien drama. I didnt like the whole story of them being half sisters through their mother. For season 2 they change it but still it was pretty boring.
@@BlueBlazeKing plus not all of the characters were rich. Dan was struggling to fit in and you see that with Jenny. The characters were fully dynamic because Blair wasn't just evil all the time, she can be soft while Serena was more soft and could be like Blair in a heartbeat. This show gives one personality and they run with just that
The fact that the most shocking thing in this video is that I had no idea Vin Diesel had a singing career😂
I audibly shrieked at that. His voice, I cant, LOL????
same
I think riverdale managed to survive because it is so bonkers. Anything can happen, so it becomes more memorable than a regular teen drama
True. Riverdale was also on Netflix and not HBO (which not many ppl have)
it survived because it was on The CW, it's always the netflix shows and recently HBO shows that get cancelled like crazy.
@@Shay416 Sounds like an excuse to me.
I think it was more because it was just eye candy
@@justamiracle2414 true
Max actually has a decent and very tragic arc from beginning to end. He starts out as a Chuck Bass clone but grows into a pretty kind and selfless person through being shown love by Audrey and Aki, only to then find out that he was more of an experiment for them than a real part of their relationship.
Exactly. I think Max was the only good part of the show honestly.
@@BooksRebound as he said the person playing Max is a good actor, he has alot of charisma, and it’s kinda funny how his character has so much charisma, but Aki is just the polar opposite of his character (I think that’s why they gave Aki pink hair), in terms of duality it does work, but Aki doesn’t really grow as a character and shows that he is ultimately out of place when it comes to the couple, and maybe some of it is due to Max constantly upstaging him, in terms of charisma, etc, then again it could be due to Aki’s voice, because they say that deeper voices (like Max) people tend to like more / give more credit to
You wanna know why it REALLY failed? Because Josh Schwartz wasn't the main showrunner this time around. Josh Schwartz created The OC, arguably the best teen drama of all time, and when that show ended he went to work on Gossip Girl. However he got the opportunity to work on his dream project "Chuck" so he sorta handed over the reins to his work partner Stephanie Savage and she and Joshua Safran took over AFTER season 1 (which is hands down the best season of original GG). Savage is the reason why Chuck Bass became essentially the lead male after season 1 because she loved his dynamic with Blair. Safran then became the head showrunner around season 4-5 and there's a pretty obvious dip in quality there, Schwartz and Savage return to GG for its final season just to wrap things up. GG (2021) Safran started out as showrunner with no real help from Schwartz or Savage becuase they were only executive producers this time around. It's pretty clear Safran does not know what to do with his characters and had even the original GG been his he'd have sunk that ship too.
The OC was amazing… for like one season.
@@jamescarr1265season 1 is definitely the best, I enjoyed seasons 2 and 3 although they definitely felt a little sillier than the previous seasons, and we don’t talk about season 4 lol
@ I loved season 4 thought season 3 was awful and boring
There was such potential in the remake but as always, the understanding of social media eludes screenwriters for some reason.
Probably because most of them are old
@@balabanasireti You can be old and still have some insight and including fresh voices in the writing world but you’re not totally wrong.
No there wasn't, the fact that it's a reboot means it can't be good
Im not even mad with its understanding of social media but just the idea of julien being insta famous when all she does is go on live, and her lives are the most boring thing ever
Like there are people that get tiktok famous and they always have the most chaotic and funny tiktok lives (look at terri jo/kelon, hes CARRYING the app right now) but even those people arent getting celebrity level famous from just going on live like julien has
yeah, bc original gossip girl was based off a book which was based on reality. the author wrote about her own experiences living among rich teens, bc it always helps to draw from real people. like Julien should have been a Kendall Jenner/Lily Rose type, who's a nepo baby, but thinks she's above it and constantly "checks" her rich friends (a-la Kendall going "everybody's beautiful, nobody needs anything", or her Pepsi commercial)
and this time around the writers didn't have a realistic personalities to go off of, they just made up very shallow characters with just surface level characteristics like "social media person", "woke activist", "mean girl w mommy issues", "sex obsessed bisexual"
idk maybe the casting really mattered too, because i absolutely believed that Blake Lively is drowning in the sea of men attracted to her and her giggly girly sexy persona. i absolutely believed Leighton as cut-throat over achiever, Chace as a boring pretty guy, Ed as a sleazy rape-y womanizer
but here everyone is just annoying, though i would agree that Savannah, Whitney, Zion and Thomas could do better with a better script and character arcs.
Despite the GG reboot being awful, I’m glad that everyone acknowledged that Monet (Smith) and Luna (Moreno) were missed opportunities for amazing storylines and character development!
True both of them and Max carried the show but we spent time with annoying Julien
@@metalhead2583 I felt that Max and Rafa were attractive but for me Jordan and Aki were not
Monets acting was so bad
@@boricua584 I thought she was good and she made the character iconic
Luna would been the new Serena and Monet would've been the new Blair. It would of been epic. Josh safran should not be allowed to work on any anymore shows.
I just love that you took a break from hating the show to give Monet and Luna their flowers. Always staying fair! 💕
Luna and Monet should been the main characters fr
Luna was boring though and didn't have a storyline most of the time, and when they tried giving her one, it was boring as hell.
@@iheartTH1203 that’s the problem she had incredible charisma and was generally the smartest person in the room but barely given anything to work with
I think the "woke" girl could work. Like when celebs act woke in a performative but tone deaf way. But you have to address the hypocrisy and make it funny, not annoying and not the only character trait
What you said, and coupled with popular liberal values promoted SUBTLY. E.g. A female POC is trying to advance her career in an area where the top is dominated by rich white men, but she never expresses dislike for men or Caucasians as groups, and said rich white men aren't made out to be one dimensional villains.
The thing is that the whole unsubtle lampshading of wokeness has been done to death too. Its been done well, its been done poorly and at the end of the day, calling out wokeness is just low hanging fruit. It isnt funny or clever, and most of the time the criticisms either devolve into shallow tory strawmen or on the flipside, they try too hard to play both sides and not come off as conservative to really have fun with the satire. At the end of the day who cares? Young people talk about other things than broad social politics, and a teen drama should be allowed to speak to the lives of teenagers without inserting some outdated 2014 era commentary about "wokeness gone mad" or "white men this and that". Its dull.
right like if gg exposed that she’s performative instead of whatever they did with Zoya, it would’ve been a very good social callout on performative activism and liberal activism as a whole
imo, fake wokeness IS a lowhanging fruit and the writers could’ve gone with that, but they didn’t. which makes it even more frustrating because it was such an easy but engaging plot point that they could’ve done but chose not to.
@@PoochieCollinsso she lives in wonderland? 😭
the OG gossip girl was based on successful books whereas i feel these didnt rely on any source material. its important to note the author of the books went to private high school in nyc and experienced her classmates being wild like that, whereas i wonder what the script writers for the reboot relied on
the georgina scenes kinda made me realize how goofy the tone of the og is in comparison to the new one. There's no shenanigans in the new show. it takes itself so seriously. It was probably hard for the actress to take that larger than life character into this more realistic show.
Maybe its because she is a grown ass woman who still behaves like a teenager
Regarding Zoya, I’m all for progressive messages in media, but I much prefer them to be conveyed through engaging storylines, rather than a single character that spews out progressive sounding one-liners that only touch the surface
More like regressive messaging
...I mean, do we even have anything in media that isn't progressive messages?
@@skurinskinah
progressive? it's just hypocritical because it never goes both ways... blackwashing is as bad as whitewashing
@@juliaflohr there's a significant minority of media that's shamelessly right wing, TBF.
Omg Georgina speaking like an AI was so ominous and terrifying, wtf was that😭
She was meant to be terrifying but I liked her in the og gossip girl
But in the reboot she scares me
@@Missmagazinebura but spaceninja is right like what was the point of her to be there other than bait the nostalgia fans?
No literally she was losing to Siri for vocal emphasis
PLS FR
Thank you for pointing this out, it was driving me crazy. I couldn’t figure out what that flat, vaguely garbled delivery reminded me of, but it’s definitely evil Siri.
Weirdly I was far more invested in Audrey's mother's story. What is it like for your social circle and relationships to evaporate after your husband casts you aside for someone else? That was interesting. Sadly, it was kind of dismissed by making her an embarrassing alcoholic.
EXACTLY! These producers don't actually care about social justice issues. They just use diversity as a shield from criticism for bad takes, lazy writing, or both.
exactly just put 5 black girls and call that diversity
Modern film/tv series making - surface, in your face portrayals of social ideas through characters without at least trying to do something believable with it.
Same shit has happened with last Silent Hill game demo - it was so painful to watch how they have portrayed suicidal thoughts and depression... Like someone just scrolled through Twitter and used it as a source for how people act when they are depressed.
Such practices do more harm than good
Disney+ Percy Jackson in a nutshell
The Gossip Girl I would have wanted : Kate, growing up being a fan of the original Gossip Girl, always dreamed of pulling a Dan Humphrey and writing her way into High society, so she starts teaching at the same school as the original cast, and picks on a random group of kids. Except that she quickly realizes that in world of fan and anti fan accounts, no one really cares about a random social media accounts posting weird rumors about people no one cares about. So she starts framing the students into more and more scandalous situations, creating her own drama, and accidentaly stumbles upon an actual secret that links everyone together... now she starts teasing the students, threatening to reveal their shared secret and droping hints here and there. But she soon realizes that she messed with the wrong people and better stay anonymous, because her life is now in danger
THIS ACTUALLY SOUNDS REALLY GOOD!
That feels more like a reverse PLL tbh
I kept saying maybe the teacher being GG aspect could have worked if it was ONLY KATE. I would have made her the “new teacher” starting out at Constance but she’s either a fan of Dan Humphrey (and wants to be a novelist like him) or she could be like an undercover reporter for the spectator. She opens GG with the goal of exposing the headmistress getting bribed by rich parents for her story; but the deeper she gets the worst she the secrets she finds. One being Rafa grooming his students. Also the her exposes the rich parents effects the kids (which the way they react/deal with GG exposing parents causes kids to act out and more news for GG). In either the season 1 finale or 2 premiere I would have Kate get anonymous messages threatening to expose her. This anonymous person also hacks Kates GG account and posts things she doesn’t want when she doesn’t do what the hacker tells her. Maybe by the end she actually gets exposed idk but that’s the only way the teacher aspect could have worked.
That sounds good but it also sounds like a PLL rip-off lol
@@depgabby The OG Gossip Girl was the inspiration for PLL so…..
Michelle's performance was giving "I did it for a check. I was an employee"
Man you yelling about acresses being super capable if only they had better writer/directors is always my favorite part of these videos
with that said trachtenberg supercut made me cringe into a black hole
@@42neddy yeah what the hell was that??? I can’t even tell which aspect is to blame for those scenes being off
@@AJ-pu9jq killer giorginas from outer space
The great thing about past teen dramas (other than nostalgia) was that they were startlingly vapid and did not aim to send any messages they just operated on full chaos and didn’t take themselves too seriously the new ones seem to take themselves too seriously and try to fit into what they think a socially conscious gen-z audience would like and it just misses every audience altogether
Gossip girl being the teachers as a collective has lived in my head rent free for what is now years. It contrasts so sharply with the time I offered to put a sticker I designed on a water bottle I was gifting to my sister, a teacher. She grimaced and said, “I don’t want to make my students think I’m too interesting.”
I just can’t get past it.
Ahh the good ol days when teachers didn't share their personal lives with you and try indoctrinating you.
@@nukiesduke6868 buddy, i wanna make this clear to you so you understand how profoundly my sister and I do not agree with your implied sentiment. My anecdote was about how teachers keep most their lives private, even ones who share snippets, and generally not being invested in their students personal lives in turn. Teachers are trying to make their students into empathetic, capable, engaged and curious people. Educating is not indoctrination. I’m sorry the education system failed to teach you curiosity and empathy, as well as reading comprehension. But please take your “anti woke” nonsense elsewhere.
Right? It's just sooo weird, and then they kinda try to make that teacher sympathetic??
This show was soooo aesthetic and beautiful to look at. That was it. It’s only redeeming quality. The kids were so pretty. The fashion was perfect. Black folks looking AMAZING. But the writing deserved the bin.
That’s the only thing that I truly like about the show. It’s beautiful and the cast are very pretty to look at.
Monet and Audrey had the best fashion.
they were too focused on diversity and thinking if we put this then ppl will watch. Tired of shows thinking if they just put a black person in the show, it's just good enough, why not have good writing and diversity? I think it's an excuse to say "yeah we tried and it didn't work"
All style and no substance 😭
Pretty much only good thing was their outfits slaying
Finally someone mentions the fact the some of the main characters who have been friends since they were kids hadn't interacted with eachother ever in the show, it always bothered me😩
KIDS?? bruh they look like total strangers to each other wtf were these writers thinking
The problem with this show is something that Camille de Haan pointed in the second season, she was talking to her daughter Monet but it can perfectly be applied to the show in general: The show put more effort into how it looks: Decorations, locations, costumes than in the quality of writing: the plots,storylines, the characters, etc, etc. And that is the main reason why it is unlikely that currently some streaming giant wants to acquire it, it costs a lot of money and it is really not worth investing so much in an empty product. It’s really sad because I really loved the show, specially characters as Monet, Camille, Luna…
I agree. The show looks great in the most literal sense. But besides it’s looks…what else is there??
you know what is sad though? it looks good but also is extremely unmemorable. Like you can find entire recreations of blair and serena's apartment online for like the sims, but for some reason the only location I remember for gg 2021 is the green bathroom in school. People pay hundreds of dollars to recreate blair's outfits for season one, and her wedding dress made an entire generation adore elie saab, AND YET 2021 dresses audrey twice in the same dress in different colours? bc they couldn't be bothered to find something else that fit i guess? it so sad.
Og GG had the same problem esp with later seasons. It wasn't exceptional writing and the plot was stretched out. I tuned and finished the season in hindsight because of the fantastic wardrobe and the good looking cast plus bc of attachment to first and second season. Maybe you're a viewer of the og who grew up on GG and now watching the reboot. You're older now and that's how you see through the glitz and glam and see the horrible writing.
And you spoke on my biggest gripe. Them telling us these people were a group of friends instead of showimg us or building on it definitely ruined it.
You know, I'm normally terrible at recognizing bad acting (combination of autism and just not watching a ton of stuff). Georgina's line delivery made me raise an eyebrow in real life
Cackling 😂😂😂
Same, I can't even see bad acting when FSN points it out, but 2 of the 3 exceptions were in GG 2021 !
(So Georgina, Kate and Mallory in Cruel Summer)
It's like Moira from Schitt's Creek's acting, but like ... unironically lol
I do love the idea of Michelle just going: Sure I'll take a check from HBO and give zero effort
Add someone who had not seen even one episode of this remake, the actress who plays Luna is the one who strikes me as the most realistic person to pay the "biggest influencer in New York." She has a real screen presence, and I could totally see her appearing on everyone's Instagram feed. I wish they'd chosen her instead of the kind of milquetoast main character, who just doesn't strike me as iconic like Luna does.
yes! Julien is too mousy and obsessed with feeling guilty! It's written all over her body language! Definitely not IT girl material, atleast not as she was being portrayed
plus her full name (luna la) just FEELS like a influencer name. its perfect she needed to be the it girl
I haven't watched Gossip Girl but I have this weird feeling that the Audrey, Aki, and Max trio was an attempt of recreating Elite's Carla, Polo, and Christian trio, but in a less entertaining way.
Weirdly enough I always say Elite as the spiritual succesor of Gossip Girl, and I still think it is
OHH, tea! Yeah you're probably right.
It's the only reason I watched the show honestly. A throuple always gets me interested. I love a love triangle. A REAL love triangle. What people call love triangles are actually just Love Vs, because there's no line connecting the two love interests to each other.
And actually poly relationship or a triangle where everyone is interested in everyone is always entertaining
they even made audrey very similar to carla but without any purpose in the show
It was…. I could see Carla looking at this show and say “if this a 🤬 play about us?” 😂😂😂
@@oppakunn328 I always felt that Ellite was a newer more raunchier version of the OH Gossip Girl and that this reboot tried to copy it 😂
So glad you brought up Modern Gurlz and other creators! Love seeing my favorites cross paths
“Some of us have hair! 😡” is the FUNNIEST but CRAZIEST line I’ve ever heard in my life Jesus 😭
Never watched Gossip Girl, but I did watch Riverdale. One thing to say about Riverdale is that they did solve their original mystery. 😂
Edit: They did kinda solve it. But then went back and added so many more layers to the point that there was no solution.
Riverdale was convoluted too. But the central mystery was solved and they never really made that more convoluted.
Go watch the original. So good s1 is peak teen drama. And it keeps going.
Honestly u don't have to its not good after season 2 I don't remember it being that bad
@@chadchaddingson4675The O.C better
That they did. And then they had season 2. Anyone stopped watching after the first half of season 2?
you should watch the original it's a fun ridiculous ride for sure 🙂
The Georgina talking like a robot montage followed by “Girl shut the fuck up. You thought you ate!” made me cackle!
righttt you cannot convince me that that ISN'T siri 😭
the only way i can understand Julian being the “it girl” of the gossip girl social media world with all the followers is bc she’s a nepo baby. her dad is a music producer and she’s rich so people want to look into her life. other than that i can’t understand it
You definitely should have been in the board meeting for the script writers ! I like the idea she was a nepo baby . It would be even if they narrated herself as this confident it-girl but behind the Instagram, we see her experience body dysmorphia and mid anxiety since she’s constantly nit-picked by the public.
@@michellepark1449 RIGHT i miss that show so much
OMG Georgina Sparks lines truly do sound like an AI !!! Girl really turned into a robot I can’t handle it 😭😂😂
"The narrative equivalent of being stuck in traffic" is just about the most brilliant line I've ever heard
This show (and honestly a lot of shows in recent years) can be best described as "All Looks, No Substance". As in, the producers and show-runners will put an excruciating amount of work into the surface-level details (Sets, Outfits, Aesthetics, etc) and little effort into the writing and characterization, aka the core foundation of any piece of work. They seem to think that making the show look as visually appealing as possible will be enough to carry the show and as we've seen, that just isn't enough. You need good characters and writing to carry a show and GG2021 has neither.
I think just describe the problem with most starwars shows that look gorgeous but with few exceptions are dull.
Even the aesthetics are BAD. None of them have actual style, their homes have no character, and there’s a weird yellow brown filter on a lot of scenes and everything is dark when they want to show nighttime so you can barely see them. The aesthetics suck.
90210 reboot is like this
@@DesiCat789it’s miserable colourless and fugly
Joshua Safran really embodies the "lord, grant me the confidence of a mediocre white man" concept. As both an academic and creative writer, I can only hope to one day produce something half as perfect as he THINKS Go Piss Girl 2.0 is.
GO PISS GIRL OMG I'M DYING
i mean
there'
there's probably a porn parody called that
... don't hate me plz
“Lord grant me the confidence of a mediocre white man” XD Fucking gold hahaha!
I’m so glad I wasn’t drinking my Fanta when I read this omg
Is that a line from the show? It sounds exactly like something Zoya would say during one of her racist rants against white people. Maybe you're not giving yourself enough credit here... you would've fit in very well on the writing team. If copy/pasting racist remarks about safe targets isn't mediocre enough to get you that job, then I don't know what is. Just believe in yourself, honey.
@@othertalk3313 what an unremarkable piece of commentary 🙄
You can tell even the actors didn’t do their proper research either. They also admitted in an interview after the 1 season came out that they never even watched the oginal G.G. 🙄which made me even more upset to see how unserious they “all” were
I always feel sorry for the projects/scripts that got rejected to make flops like this.
If they hadn’t blown the reveal of who Gossip Girl is they could’ve totally dropped hints and clues on the Instagram accounts they made for the characters! It would’ve been such a cool idea to drop Easter eggs or clues for other points, or even have them commenting on each others pictures to enforce bad or good relationships. Hell! You could’ve had the Gossip Girl account where all the gossip was being shared; like a confessions account!
What a damn shame they had little nuggets of good ideas but failed to do absolutely anything with that!
"referring to him as a character is an insult to fiction" SICKEST BURN IVE EVER SEEN
The catfights are especially weird to me because from my experience, girls dont really fight like this. Like in all 18 years of my life, I've seen trivial fights like this 3 times. Girls fight differently now and tbh, having catfights in shows feel a little outdated.
Honestly, I prefer the catfights over topic femininity passive-aggressive propaganda campaigns against other girls (went through the latter during my school years)
You guys have to realize schools and teens are different. Girls in my school would literally whoop each others asses over chairs 😂
@@Las645where did you go to school?
I personally have never seen a cat fight but I went to a Catholic girls high school and graduated in 1980.
I didn't watch the show, but I can feel Luna's charisma even from the clips shown in this review. A true diva over there. So sad she was not the focus of the show.
Watching the snippets of Michele’s performance was painful and I really hope it was the writers’ decision and not hers because I can’t bare to see the Dawn Summers I watched in BTVS become this.
It’s one thing for Joshua Safran to be unaware of Monet’s popularity in the show but honestly it feels like he just hates the fact that she’s so well liked. From his shady tweets about her character, to that whole weird Monet roast compilation, scrapping her out of the show’s final moments and then basically confirming she’d be sidelined if the show got a season 3. He really could have done something with that character because it was clear everyone was only sticking around for her but his ego was too far up to see anything other than the fact that this supposed “minion character” is getting more traction than the main character he’s advocating for that nobody will remember in a year let’s bet.
@Metal Head 🗣️ My thoughts exactly. We need Black show runners to create hit shows about Black girls and teens. Otherwise it’s not happening.
What? I didn’t know this, I didn’t watch the show but every clip I saw of her on UA-cam was so queen bee that I was entranced. She is literally stunning, the actress is legit probably the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen. I adore Monet’s style and I was rooting for her to take over everything once she realized Julian was not on her level. So you’re telling me the creator of the show doesn’t like her??
@Metal Head 🗣️ arent two main characters black? Julien and Zoja?
And him being like minion is an outdated word… 😂💀 he switched up fast when he realised the audience fw monet
it’s also the fact that her character was trending on twitter before the show even started airing, i know he was big mad
I liked the idea of a teacher being Gossip Girl, but it should have been because she was annoyed by the rich people and wanted to get back at them, not to make them better.
Yes they never got better tho
@@Missmagazinebura They were really not that horrible to begin with.
I liked the teacher , i Thought it was very clever.
I loved how greedy she gets and makes sense it was fun seeing Kate run around , something we never got to see with Dan
it would've been cool if she was a friend or minion of JENNY from the original show (would've allowed her to have ties to Jenny and Dan for her to get the page again) and out of her own spite attack the teens of Constance just her how her and Jenny was treated.
She literally was harassing Julian and Zoya the most, but they were the nicest to the teachers. It was Monet who was mean to Kate, so why was she mostly targeting Julian and Zoya's family? So stupid!
It really does feel like a critical flaw in a lot of ensemble shows, teen or adult, is that they pick the main characters in advance. I feel like, unless they have a very strong sense of plot across seasons (which drama shows almost never do), they should be using the first season to introduce and basically audition main characters. If showrunners are going to be this chronically unable to predict which characters are going to connect with audiences, they should at least have a bit of humility about it.
Gossip Girl was a combination of drama, high society, fashion, and really great casting. I think the tv show went on for so long because the cast had a lot of chemistry and charisma. Also, a lot of the show was about love and friendship, the characters would go to great lengths to help the ones they loved, Blair and Dan especially, and Chuck used his money a lot of times to pamper and take care of Blair. Every season they had some conflict that involved all of them personally or they would come together to help one of them (mainly Serena). They had a lot of conflicts but would always work it out or forgive and get together again. The show wouldn't work if they weren't kind of always together, that's why the college phase of the show was a little weird, they had to make some choices to keep them all in the same place somehow. So I feel like the new GG keeping the characters kind of separate messed up a lot with their potential to build chemistry and charisma through their relationships.
It's kinda weird that they didn't make the one person who hates being rich being the one to lecture everyone on morality. Like, this would be so much more coherent than a bunch of super rich kids who revel in their own wealth and bully TEACHERS but *genuinely* care about changing the world for the better with big bold political moves. Make him call out the hypocrisy of people who posture as politically engaged but are actually completely self-centered
In my mind, I think part of the reason for the spiraling quality of teen drama/ writing in general for most media in recent decades is who it’s coming from.
Think about it, most people in Hollywood are fundamentally completely distanced from the people and subjects they write about and are stuck in their bubble of people who have no real problems. There’s a fundamental lack of grounding in their mindset and to worsen the issue, the system is designed to blow their egos out of proportion with a mild amount of success and take it all away once a public failure comes out. Not to mention so many of these people are more privileged than anyone of any background could possibly know, and that reflects in their works.
Tldr; more often than not good writing experience comes from experiencing struggle and sacrifice. You get a fundamental understanding of writing themes when you understand them in a deep way. When your biggest problem has always been twitter, well it shows.
Edit: a good example of what I mean is puss in boots the last wish, which was actually based on Antonio Bandera’s feelings and real internal crisis about aging.
This is so true; Skins was literally written by people who were British teens so they knew exactly what was up. And thevog GG books were written after research -!thevwriter even said she had to tone some irl stuff down to make it believable
Very true. Unfortunately, it's a vicious circle: making it to Hollywood as an unknown scriptwriter is extremely hard when you don't already have connections in the industry. Hell, submitting any project without at least one famous name involved is useless because, more often than not, it will not be taken seriously, if even funded to begin with. So, of course, such elitism shows in every character. Hollywood doesn't care about realism, about relatablility, or even about quality, as much as it does quantity. It's always been that way.
This makes me think about Jules special episode from Euhporia, which Hunter Schafer helped write and was considered by many people incredibly well written and very well down in its portrayal of trans identity because AN ACTUAL TRANS WOMAN wrote it- and then how when season two of Euphoria came out everyone hates Jules and she seemed out of character. It’s always important to have different point of views in the writing room
You can’t keep putting out banger videos at this length they’re too amazing! 😭
That's a good thing though....
@@shannonceleste5557 I know!
Personally I think there's another underlying reason that the GG reboot failed.
The original series was heavily based on the YA novels by Cecily von Ziegesar. The reboot, however, was not.
What is odd to me though, is that there's actually material for a proper GG sequel, because there's a sequel series to the GG novels following a set of triplets that just moved to the Upper East Side.
Literally
This video essay is the first time I’ve heard the dialogue from Georgina in season 2! I saw gifs with subtitles and I imagined her saying these lines like she sounded in the original show… oh boy that was devastating to hear here
Savannah Lee Smith and Zion Moreno are absolutely main character material. They made it work with this show's horrible writing, IMAGINE their power if they were given actually GOOD writing!
Hot take: Emily Alyn Lind is more main character material than both of them.
I strongly believe Michelle Trachtenberg wasn't willing to make a cameo on GG again but was kindapped and all her lines are delivered via a AI alongside deepfakes to make it believable. She is not the toxic thanos level menace threat mother i know but an impostor.
Nope. She pitched her return. She wanted to return in season 1. My theory is that she is the biggest no name out of the original.who has not a lot going on and so she was desperate for the attention. She is in her own flop era rn
She acts really weirdly nowadays… I genuinely think she was high or something filming.
I still think it's so sad that Grand Army got cancelled and didn't even get a wider recognition. For me, it stands separate from the Gossip Girl reboot or something like the live-action Winx show. It Was such a good show. Sure, it was VERY intense and raw, but I felt it was a lot more honest and less cringy than all the other shows. Especially comparing it to 13 reasons why, it had some similar themes būt developped then SO MUCH BETTER. I am still mad at Netflix for this.
I totally agree.
I loved that show, it was so realistic.
I agrée i loved grand army so much
grand army was amazing, all the characters had such a good development, it deserved a season two, it's still one of my favorite series
@@jenniferk4190frr I need an epilogue for that show bc I can’t go one not knowing how the characters end up 😭😭
Yeah it unfortunately got cancelled bc it was exposed there was severe racist discrimination among the POC writers in the writers room
they wanted to have their cake and eat it too with julien, like they kept saying she was the queen bee, the it girl, that she would destroy anyone in her way, but also that people loved her because she was nice, and julien never felt like a real person. Like pick a lane
Your GG 2021 video is one of my favorites because of how absolutely brutal you were 😂 it’s always such a delight to watch!
Interesting that you brought up the show creating social media profiles for the characters - SKAM, a realistic Norwegian teen drama which is one of the only recent shows to make a strong case for good teen dramas, did that first, but it was utilised as an innovative way to tell the story, not a marketing technique. The show was released in small real time online clips - the story would unfold adjacent to viewer's real day to day lives, and therefore made them a lot more invested. The characters Instagrams felt super realistic, mimicked current online trends seamlessly and would provide little teasers, clues and hooks for upcoming clips. Honestly it was so innovative and mf genius.
Monet shoulda been the main character and fleshed out her relationship with her parents and THEN over time in future seasons go through a “redemption arc” of trying to be a better person like how Julian was from the jump. It gives us time to be invested and root for her growth instead of repeating the redundant storyline we got with Julian.
YES ! Monet aka Savanah Smith was a scene stealer the entire series she had all the charisma the main character lacked
Personally, I think British teen dramas should be the only ones approved from now on. They seem to get everything right about how teenagers work, from their social media, to their interpersonal relationships, to their personalities, their internalised views on society and most of all, they allow them to be played by actors that actually look like imperfect teenagers!
Any recommendations?
@@Boo-et1qj try Red Rose. those characters behave like actual teenagers
@@Boo-et1qj Sex education, Ladybird and skins are the only ones that come to mind rn
As in teenagers from the west society? Because us Asians and South Asians are nothing like that💁🏻♀️
@@Parthivigupta don't you guys have doramas and all those j/k/etc-dramas? Of course we're talking about western culture and western teenagers here.
More people are gonna watch this video in the first 24 hours of its release than watch gossip girl 2021 in this entire year
There was never an overarching conflict and the kids’ loyalties and personalities kept flip flopping every other episode. Also they focused so much on the influencer and social media changes in the narratives that they forgot about the actual influence and power and prestige and wealth that these kids had.
Just for funsies, I'm gonna write my own Gossip Girl 2021 fanfic right here. Here's how I would play with these characters:
- Since Julian apparently doesn't work as a charming, malicious top influencer, and the actress isn't doing a great job at it either, let's change the character completely: Julian is now a 100% good natured person who just wants to make it big as a model/influencer, but she's also rather weak willed and not ready for how competitive and ruthless this world is. Her arc could be about navigating the unfair world of gossip and fame, even becoming a darker version of herself at some point, eventually learning that she doesn't want to give up on her morals and her kind nature just to become famous and make money
- Zoya is still a bad excuse of a social justice warrior, but now she's PURPOSELY pedantic and annoying, to the point where it's clear that people around her barely can stand her: she may have really good intentions, but she's going about it the wrong way, and she doesn't realize it, making her frustrated at how little she's being heard. Meanwhile she's also jealous that her sister is becoming famous through modeling/Instagram, and becomes angrier and angrier about it, which could also be a cool commentary on how the vapid and often toxic world of celebrities usually gets a lot more attention than actual important causes and activism. More on her later
- I like that there's a throuple and it's actually really easy to solve the issue of their writing: them getting together needs to be a lot more gradual. Imagine you find yourself slowly falling in love with two people at the same time, most people's first reaction would be "wait this can't be, I need to choose only one", and so they dance around each other for a very long time before they realize that they feel exactly the same way about each other and just decide to become a polyletionship. Their arc could be all about navigating the difficulties that come from such a bond: dealing with jealousy, with misunderstandings, and with how the people around them react to their relationship, how they fight for their right to be together at all. Also, why only show them naked in back in the middle of afterglow? Let them go on cute dates dammit, I'm always down to showing people in love being intimate on screen, but this is the only instance i can think of of a polyletionship being shown in a big production, so show them being in other situations too!
- Since Monet and Luna are clearly the best characters, why not make them the protagonists? Why not revolve the whole show about their relationship? I think it would be cool if the both of them could be the queen bee type, manipulating people around them to gain influence and control, but I also think it would be fun if they weren't simply rivals, but also friends. Two mean girl friends having a competition on who can get to the top first sounds pretty awesome if you ask me. Meanwhile all the issues in their lives presented in the show (what little was shown anyway...) should be expanded upon massively, making them the center of the entire story. Also, you have a trans character? Show the difficulties that come with being transexual in this world dammit, don't be a coward, especially not now when trans people are experiencing massive violence and backlash in general
- And maybe it's my little sapphic heart speaking, but... this is MY fanfic, so I think Monet and Luna should eventually get together
- But wait, what about Gossip Girl? Well, I think Zoya would actually be a pretty good candidate for it. She could use Gossip Girl as a tool to expose the vanity, the arrogance, the superficiality of the upper class and all the people surrounding her. Maybe for most of the show people could think that GG is actually either Monet or Luna, since in this version they are the most popular and most unhinged characters of all, and maybe at some point even poor Julian could be accused of being the eye watching over them, but no, it was her sister all along, once again living in her shadow.
I'm not saying this version would be any better (not with better actors at least...) but I would certainly have a lot of fun writing/watching this.
Honestly, that sounds so much better! Give yourself some credit, that sounds really fun, I would definitely watch that
Yeah this version is 100% better. Monet and Luna should have been who people thought were GG while it was Zoya all along I stead of Zoya and her sister fighting over Obi who has no charisma or personality. Nate might have been boring but at least he was cute, charming and not one dimensional.
I read some of the books and I felt that Vanessa was GG. Zoya would have been a great GG, so entitled, an outsider and bang, she is the one that is exposing everyone online.
Love the smart and detailed write-up!
Julien’s new arc is giving Jenny Humphrey circa season 1 love it
About characters having social media like irl for us to follow, the original "Skam" had that and i loved it ❤ I think they executed it really well, teasing us about what would or could happen
I'd say the German remake "Druck" was pretty good at giving all the characters their own personalities and voices on their social media
(and SKAMEs!! they were great at it too!!!)
the original Skins did that too, in like 2008...
@@lemondrizzlecake7766 I only watched skins recently so I didn't know, but how ahead of their time doing that in 2008!
I was looking for this comment, the Instagram profiles in Skam were great and actually worked in favor of the plot.
But OG Skam is one of the best teen shows that I have ever watched and I don’t think US could ever do something that great.
@@ninalucy1178 They truly were!! I can't even exactly remember I think they had MySpace profiles for all the main characters? It was that long ago! and also released online-only mini episodes alongside the main show. That was very much not the norm back then, as a teenager at the time I remember thinking it was so cool!
C'est toujours un plaisir de regarder une vidéo de mon ninja préféré, et ça me fait travailler mon aglais
The reboot had soo much potential. But, they were kinda doomed from the start by keeping the same name. They should've called it something else....like, XOXO or something 🤷🏾♀️
A reboot can't have potential
Wasn't there an XOXO before? Show or book series?
That wouldn't have saved them from the fact that half the cast can't act and the writing was often...trash. To put it nicely.
@@Chibbykins fr
@@radhiadeedou8286 Raven's Home, which is a reboot of That's So Raven is actually really good...they're on their 5th season.
i could literally make a whole hours-long video essay on how the GG reboot could be fixed (and i just might lol) but my BIGGEST change would be to make Max, Luna and Monet the main focus of the show rather than Julien, Zoya and Audrey/Aki. Not only are all three of them the ones w the most charisma, but the all have interpersonal issues with friends AND family that could motivate their actions (morally grey as those actions would be). I just hope that these three are somehow on a new project together and whoever is at the front of that project knows exactly what to do with all of their charisma, uniqueness, nerve and talent
Something that i find strange about teen dramas is that, in a lot of them, the main characters almost always end up being unlikeable assholes while the narrative constantly bends over backwards to validate them. I wonder why that keeps happening in these types of shows.
I'm not saying this is exclusive to teen dramas, just that i feel is more notorious in this genre.
Right! They write character that is horrible but try so hard to sell them as good souls. Ironically that was the magic of both Blair and Chuck, they were arguably the worst people in lead original cast but they didn't try to act like they arent. They owned it and thrived in it, never one writers tried to force on watchers that they are good people, they werent. But there were SO MANY moments when they actually showed they were good people in their own right, but it wasnt forced to show it...
Serena, on the other hand was always forced for people to believe she is the good girl, or at least changed, (but its still worked because she was better than those two, and actually tried sometimes), and I think that is the main reason people prefer Blair to her.
I think one of the main problems will the reboot is the OG series relied on being set in the 2000s like those pre big social media days when you had to go to blogs and random sites online to see what celebrities were up to
Never seen this show but Zoya's hair is always on point in these scenes. Like girl, what's your hair routine?
The biggest flaws of the reboot is the fact that one, none of the cast had chemistry, two, the characters were boring and a lot of them couldn't act and three, the writers had no idea how to integrate social media and the current environment for teenagers. The writers had plenty of possibilities when it came to writing the new era, especially when you look at the current day influencer. Instead it seems like they just dabbled into it without going all in.
The show had potential. It did. But they were so afraid to turn the new cast into extreme personalities. The reason why the original worked is because of Blair. I'm not saying the rest didn't do well, but Blair was the standout and Leighton Meester's performance was the real deal. But let me point out , Gossip Girl was only good for one season and the second season was tolerable. Anything after that. It was a grievance.
finding out that Penn Badgley was in the original gossip girl is the kind of random fact I didn't know I needed to know today, but am glad I found out about.
He was literally the gossip girl, lol. (but we ignore that since it didnt make ANY sense whatsoever)
I ususally do not comment on YT videos, but I want to say that I am INCREDIBLY entertained by your amazing videos. I laughed so hard during your Flash and Riverdale reviews/breakdowns and I feel like they’re very insightful in the context of media studies. Also I LOVE that they’re super long, I love putting on your videos as a sort of podcast and listening to it. Keep up the great work!
The way I was looking for another YT retrospective and was blessed seeing this notification 😭 Thank you for your service and I’ll be listening to this for the first two hours of my WFH shift 🎉
1:07:59 “Nobody wants to see a teacher.” I can’t help but think this was a meta comment Josh put in so he can seem like he’s in on the joke after all the criticism the show got for the teachers being Gossip Girl.
So I never watched this reboot but from the way you were describing the MC at 17:35, it feels like they made Gossip Girl but instead of making someone like Blair or Serena the MC, they made Vanessa the MC. No wonder it flopped. 😂
Oh wow, I never thought of that! 😂 I always assumed (from descriptions) that she was Serena if Serena stayed back and Audrey is Blair if Blair never got ambitious to become a Queen Bee, and Monet is kinda Blair as a kingmaker than a queen or maybe Nelly Yukie of she was ambitious from the get go. I think your take is better, seems like Vanessa, someone who thinks they're good but is selfish and is chaotic.
@@sindhusanthanakrishnan5465 I feel like their chances would have been better if they didn't market the show as a Gossip Girl reboot and instead made it its own show with its own identity. They butchered the Gossip Girl premise anyway. 😂
I first wanted to say how appreciative I am of your videos. I found a few of them and they're really, really great. It made me realize why I haven't been connecting with many new shows. There is no real impact and most are just incredibly boring. It's okay for us to ask for more from television shows.
Only positive thing about this show was that it was so bad it literally made my sister and I go and rewatch the original GossipGirl and we’re having the best time. Sure some of it is dated and cringey but man it’s such a great show we’re on season 4. Trust me if you haven’t watched GG in years or since it first aired I recommend going back and watching. Blair alone is just completely iconic. Also the music is *chefs kiss* I couldn’t get through the first season of the reboot and I sure as hell was not even a bit interested in the second season. There was still so much material from the original books they could’ve used and I’m sure would’ve been waaaaaay more interesting than whatever GG2 was. Just sad really.
28:27 I wouldn't say the original Gossip Girl characters had no humanity, I think that most of their horrible behavior came from somewhere deeper and that's what made them work as characters. They were complex (especially/mostly in S1) and complicated, and frustrating and it was amazing. I wish they at least attempted to do that nowadays in teen shows.
Ok, but real talk, Zoya really seems to have been inspired from woke internet comments, all woke characters seem to be based on internet outrage, producers really think that's what young people want to hear because those are the most vocal among us. So I don't know who is to blame, art immitates life in this case.
I agree wholeheartedly however I feel Zoya needs a character who challenges her “wokeness” and make her think in a more grey area with her very aggressive approach and actually make her a actual character.
Could’ve work if it was a critique of ppl like her who view themselves as morally superior. Or maybe a parody. Like obviously they support the right causes but for the wrong reasons.
I don't know. If you are a writer you know that people are complex. Believing young people are plain just because of what they tweet would be really condescending of them. A good writer investigates what makes their subject matter worth writing about. If you don't respect or care about 2020s teenagers, why write about them?
@@GiulianaBruna as If entertainment media hasnt been condescending to young People, especially young boys in teen dramas for the last decade...
I am surprised that in this day and age of the internet, no one has jumped on you for just uttering the words “among us”
French version of “skam” the tv show did the instagram profiles with a very cool addition : the tv show was released on UA-cam one clip at a time, then on Friday the full episode: meaning that if something happened Sunday at 10 am, you’d see it on their UA-cam channel at exactly that time + if you followed their instagrams you’ll see a story or a picture or a post that the character would have posted at the same time. I loved that show ❤❤❤
Skam is originally Norwegian. There are many remakes from different countries.
Ninety nine percent sure that Zoya never interacted with Aki cuz he’s got so many diversity points that no argument with him would make her look good.
I think you’re right 💀
Funny because all of that makes him everything but an actual character.
Never talk to Max
You nailed it. If they had made Luna and Monet the main characters it totally would’ve worked. They are both definitely woke, but like you said, narcissistic as fuck, and they didn’t apologize for it. That’s what the OG gossip girl was.
Plus, Monet always gave me Queen bee vibes!
So basically every character could be interesting(Luna, Monte, and Max) in this show is always sidelined for people who isn’t worth it and why Michelle why. Georgiana was a amazing villain in the original.
A lesson to be learned: Be careful to make "spin off's" 10 years later. It's raising certain expectations since GG went on for 6 seasons. The audience who watched GG back in the 2000's were probably in high school or young adults. The now 20-30 year old's may not be interested in newly produced high school drama, and the younger audience might have missed out on the original and have no nostalgia attached to it.
The only late spin off that worked for me was Hocus Pocus 2.
Late 20s to mid 30s
Oh my god thank you so much for pointing out that dinner scene cause in 2x02 cause when it came out and I watched it was the moment I realised the show would not change cause of how boring, uninteresting and how desperate they tried to make it funny and it messes with the whole pacing like it was so awful!
I love hearing your commentary on these shows, it helps me not make the same mistakes when writing my own.
I will say, one good things about awful shows like this is that it gives me so much more confidence in my abilities as a writer because I probably could've done a marginally better job with the concept when I was 12