Hello Upper East Siders. Oh how I've missed Kristen Bell's narration.
It's been almost nine full years and Gossip Girl is back on our screens. Especially since are lives are fully ensconced in social media, it feels like this is a thing that could happen in a high school. (I do love the characters making fun of the OG Gossip Girl page for being a blog, as I sit here writing my own blog.) My love for the original series is complicated. But with time I hope that the reasons I have problems with the original won't continue into this reboot. (*cough* Chuck *cough*)
I do love the twist of the teachers at Constance Dillard being the new Gossip Girl, and they acknowledge that it's a skeevy thing to do. But it takes out the mystery of Gossip Girl's identity that the original obviously didn't have the answer to until the final season when they decided it would be Dan, which still makes no sense. And, it gives them room to play and do a social media equivalent of the cat and mouse game.
There are some things early on that I notice are lacking. First off, only a few of the teen characters feel like real people right now, mainly just Zoya and Obie. The rest feel like types. Hopefully that will come with time, especially for Monet and Luna, who were pretty much only Julien's lackeys. I'm especially intrigued by Savannah Smith, who plays Monet, because she has a presence about her and I hope she has a storyline to dig her teeth into.
The second issue in the first episode is that there wasn't much humor. Hopefully that's just because they needed to set up the dramatic stakes of the show, because I don't remember the original's pilot having much of that show's signature humor.
But I'll keep watching with hope. Now that everything is set up for these new characters, maybe the action will really kick it up.
