When news broke that Gossip Girl was being rebooted most people wondered if any of the original cast would return and at this stage we still don’t know the answer to that question.
But we won’t be holding our breath for Blake Lively AKA Serena Van Der Woodsen to return as it looks like she has her own New York City-based TV show she’s working on.
Jennifer Salke, head of Amazon Studios, told Deadline, “It took a long time but we just closed a deal with Blake… and we’re talking and developing a show.”
“It’s not ready. It’s set in New York, there’s a fashion component.”
Um, I don’t know about you, but that is a show I would 100 per cent watch.
Back to the Gossip Girl reboot, co-creators Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage have revealed to Us Weekly that the show will take place in the same world as the original. This means there could be plenty of opportunities for the original cast to return in some way.
“It’s the same world. As we get closer, we can kind of roll out details of what exactly is going to be the same and tie us to the original show.”
The creators also revealed they reached out to Lively, Leighton Meester, Penn Badgley, Chace Crawford or Ed Westwick when they decided to reboot the series, but haven’t heard back from any of them about wanting to make an appearance.
“It’d be very weird to have a full series living between act four and act five,” Savage said, referencing the time jump in the final season.
“But now that that time has passed, we saw what path everyone in our original group were on. So, it could be a lot of fun to bring that into the new show in some way.”
The show will appear on HBO Max in the States, which means there are less restrictions than on regular television.
Schwartz said, “I think we’re excited to tell a different version of the story and different levels of restrictions.”
“It won’t be button-pushing just for the sake of just being able to do it. Maybe a couple ‘s–ts’ we’ll throw in there, just because we can. … You never want to do something just because. Luckily, we’re now airing post-Euphoria, so anything we do is tame by comparison.”
He added that he believes the story works just as well today as it did when Gossip Girl first aired.
“With Gossip Girl, because of the franchise at the center of it, this presence judging the secrets of the Upper East Side’s most elite young people, that felt like something that lent itself to being updated with a new generation of kids.
“That technology was essential in the first book, which was very prescient, was in blog culture. We’ve come several lifetimes since. But social media is now more a sense of everybody’s lives, so how do we lean into that and tell that story?”
There’s no word yet on when either of the new shows will be released.