Get Help, Girl

Note: The following contains spoilers for both the original Gossip Girl on the CW and the HBO reboot.

L ike the original Gossip Girl, the pilot of the HBO reboot begins with a blonde entering Manhattan on a train. But unlike the CW’s establishing shot of Serena, the ubergirl of everyone’s dreams, HBO introduces Kate Keller, the villain of the story. They might as well have named her “Karen,” for simplicity’s sake.

The reboot turns the show’s central conceit — and thus its entire power structure — upside down. To speak in the show’s parlance, the OG GG used the character of Dan Humphrey, the quasi-working-class Lonely Boy who takes the L train from Williamsburg, an outsider among his chauffeured peers, as its occasional moral conscience. Only in the finale is it revealed that he’s actually the eponymous blogger — till then, we’ve known Gossip Girl as a woman’s voice without a face. Masterfully, the show manages to reframe Dan — the spiller of secrets, exposing for public consumption the lives of his girlfriend, sister, father, and all of his friends for nearly a decade — as the heroic outsider who found a way to write himself not just into the ruling class but also into the ultimate love story with Serena.

The reboot reveals Gossip Girl’s identity in the first half of the pilot. Kate, a teacher at an Upper East Side prep school, Constance Billard St. Jude’s, learns of the original anonymous blogger and decides to revive the concept on Instagram. It’s her Foucauldian attempt to keep the school scared straight. The students, Kate and her colleagues lament, are rather rude to them on occasion. The solution: Turn the already toxic wasteland of social media into a teacher-orchestrated panopticon of social shaming, with leaked nudes, sex tapes (yes, particularly of minors), and no secret unshared.

“We’re supposed to send them out of here Barack Obamas instead of Brett Kavanaughs,” is an actual piece of dialogue uttered by Kate in an attempt to justify this lunacy.

Showrunner Joshua Safran was open about the politics of the reboot, boasting that his cast would depart from the original and have them “wrestle with their privilege,” specifically as it pertains to subjects like Black Lives Matter and income inequality. Even with its browner and queerer cast of characters, the show ultimately proves as edgy as a butter knife, deploying wokeness on all demographic fronts. It’s about as titillating as a college diversity-training session.

The grand irony of Gossip Girl moving to HBO of all places is how utterly boring and disappointingly well-behaved this generation of students is. Protagonist Julien is far nicer than Blair or even Serena ever were on their nicest days, almost to a fault. Neither she nor her friends  suffer from any of the issues that made the original show’s characters so relatable despite their ostensible “privilege.”

To recap the original run: Blair dealt with bulimia, an obvious extension of her chronic anxiety and fear of failure brought on by her father’s having left the family to be with a man. In party girl Serena’s past, long before she arrives in New York, she’d handed a line of coke to a man, killing him. Later, her brother, who comes out as gay, tries to kill himself. Nate’s dad almost dies from an intentional overdose as he faces years in prison for embezzlement and fraud. Behind Chuck’s toxic womanizing, which steers into outright violent aggression, is a child unloved by his absent billionaire father and a mother he wrongly believes to be dead.

And that’s just the first season.

By contrast, Julien and company have it easy. The front half of the season centers on the Instagram influencer arranging for her estranged half sister Zoya to come to Constance on a scholarship she secretly funds. Although we’re told that family-destroying bad blood exists between the girls’ fathers — their late mother left one for the other — all four are reconciled within a few episodes.

The show clearly wants to shock us with the saga of the sexually frustrated Audrey, her secretly bisexual boyfriend Aki, and the shared object of their lust, the “trysexual” Max. Just one problem: It’s not that interesting.

There is an interesting story a reboot could tell, especially as it pertains to wokeness. With objective demarcators of academic merit out the door, elite education and the ladder to Fortune 500 C-suites have been dominated by class signifiers. A supposed outsider like Zoya could outperform her peers on the SATs, but could her father score her an internship with the ACLU or fund her creation of a climate-change foundation? Even back when I was at a Newport Beach prep school, just a few years younger than Serena and company, summers volunteering and unpaid internships meant infinitely more to the Ivy League than a 5 on an AP Calculus exam. We could have used a good satire of the absurdities of what goes on at today’s elite schools.

After subjecting myself to twelve hours of the new GG, I can’t really tell you much about the characters. Dan wanted access to the elite and literary fame, Blair wanted Yale and prestige, Serena wanted love and respect from a man, Nate wanted to break free of his father’s expectations, and Chuck wanted to surpass them. Julien wants — what exactly? Unlike Serena, famously and devastatingly deemed “irrelevant” by Gossip Girl at the end of the second season, Julien, despite her success as an influencer, doesn’t seem to like fame all that much. Not much is at stake.

And there’s barely any drama when Zoya, whom Julien has generously invited into her school and into her heart, steals her sister’s boyfriend, Obie. Insufferable in suffering from white guilt, he isn’t attracted to Zoya except as an “activist.” This is the wokest trick the show manages to pull off: It made me scream at my television, Why the hell are these two gorgeous black girls fighting over this mediocre white man?

When you stripped off the fabulous wealth, ridiculous antics, and preternaturally good looks of the original cast, the characters were relatable. Vain and bitchy Blair was really just an insecure girl petrified that everyone preferred Serena. Flighty and beautiful Serena merely wanted to be taken seriously. Nate felt suffocated. Chuck felt isolated. Even Dan’s entire motivation behind his secret identity as Gossip Girl made sense in its own twisted way.

The reboot achieves some disturbing drama in only one respect: showing us a cabal of adults entrusted with the care of children who abuse that trust to try to terrorize them, through social-media shaming, into submission.