Gossip Girl reboot boss seems to misunderstand the point of the original series

Jezebel

“These kids wrestle with their privilege in a way that I think the original didn’t,” showrunner Joshua Safran told Variety, emphasizing that the HBO Max reboot will shy away from wealth porn and privilege porn. Safran's comments come a month after he said the reboot will avoid "slut-shaming" and "cat fights." As Marie Solis points out, Safran's comments are misguided. "It makes sense for the series to have an awareness of the political events that transpired between 2012 and 2021—on some level, it’s almost impossible for it not to. And viewers will inevitably bring an understanding of the shifts that have occurred in that time, if only unconsciously," says Solis. "But Safran seems to misunderstand the original intention of the show, which, it seems to me, was not to provide viewers with a neat moral lesson or role models to aspire to. The Gossip Girl of the late aughts and early twenty-teens was about escapism, melodrama, and even camp; more in the vein of a soap opera, it was never particularly concerned with social realism. (Might I remind everyone: Chuck Bass’s dad gets killed off in season two, brought back in season five, and then killed off again in season six.) Though one could certainly argue that it would be more realistic if the Manhattan private school students in Safran’s reboot—the children of the 1 percent—participated in slut-shaming, so-called cat fights and various unself-conscious displays of wealth, as I suspect many do in real life."