The scandalous lives of Manhattan’s elite are returning to your television, because Gossip Girl is officially getting a reboot! According to The Hollywood Reporter, WarnerMedia’s new streaming service HBO Max is reviving the steamy teen drama, which aired on The CW from 2007-2012, but the show’s legacy caters to more adult content.
These Upper East Siders were anything but naïve: Don’t be fooled by Serena van der Woodsen and Blair Waldorf’s preppy collared shirts and pleated skirts from the Constance Billard School for Girls or even Dan Humphrey’s demureness transplanted all the way from Brooklyn. The naughtiness captured in the show made for the glossiest soft porn marketing material, retrieving savage comments from scathing TV reviews and repurposing them to show publications how they catered directly to the editorial mantra of Gossip Girl: Sex sells.
It’s mind-boggling for Gossip Girl to proudly embrace its “mind-blowingly inappropriate” title bestowed by the Parents Television Council, but Rick Haskins, The CW’s executive vice president of marketing and digital programs, explained to Vulture how all press is good press. “So rather than try and do a lot of storytelling, you set the tone for the season,” he said about the first season. “That tone? A soapy, scandalous teen series filled to the brim with Upper East Side’s most delicious drama.”
The campaign shows just how attentive Gossip Girl is: Not only are the show’s executives who are pulling the strings always watching, but they’re always listening to what people have to say about the series. Seduction is “every parent’s nightmare,” lust is “nasty,” and anything peripheral to erotica is “very bad for you.” But since gossip was the central premise of the show – hello, it’s in the title – The CW knew that it would get all the buzz, making the worst reviews the best ones.
Mid-way through the first season, the “OMFG” campaign appeared, an elusive cry for help disguised in an adolescent orgasm. The scene-stealing moments of Nate Archibald and Serena hooking up behind Blair’s back and Blair losing her virginity to Chuck Bass in the back of his limousine promote the rendezvous of the show, another intentional move on Haskins’ part.
“This idea was inspired by taking a deep research dive into viewer’s social-media usage and understanding how and what they were talking about the show,” he said.
I decided to also tune in to what longtime Gossip Girl viewers had to say about these marketing techniques when I posed the question on my Instagram story, “What did you think of these Gossip Girl posters when you first saw them?”
“Raunchy,” one person replied.
“Controversial and risqué but they had everyone talking! Sex sells and it’s exciting,” another commented.
“There is no way those girls are actually that into that,” another wrote.
For most of my friends responding to my query, we were fresh into high school by the time Gossip Girl ended, making us middle schoolers for the majority of the show’s successful five-year run. For example, I was 10 when the pilot aired and 15 by the finale. What lured us into the unknown opulent kingdom of the Upper East Side, where 16-year-old boys poured themselves a Scotch after a long day of high school, was that it was too inappropriate and too unrealistic for us to be let in.
But some would like to argue that my friends and I didn’t qualify as the intended demographic. I was recommended by a friend to listen to a snippet of a bonus episode from Girls Gotta Eat, a comedic podcast hosted by Rayna Greenberg and Ashley Hesseltine about sex, dating and relationships. In the episode titled “The Most Iconic TV Couples (And Why They’re Bullsh*t),” the women talk about Gossip Girl's running theme of voracious, damnable sex.
“They wrote storylines for children that were really adult storylines,” Greenberg said. While she discussed the infrequent presence of the characters’ parents throughout the show’s six seasons, it makes sense why we hid watching this show from our own parents while it was still on the air. Life imitates art – hopefully minus the Scotch and limo sex.
With the reboot coming to HBO Max, which is set to launch in spring 2020 according to THR, the original showrunner returning to write and executively produce it, Joshua Safran, has a lot to think about in terms of marketing. Will Gossip Girl 2.0 be viewers’ streaming forbidden fruit in its raunchy glory? Or will the show actually be targeted to a demographic mature enough for its content? That’s a secret I’ll never tell.
You know you’ll love it. XOXO.
Share This Article
