Season 2 of HBO Max’s Gossip Girl Reboot Finally Lives Up to Its Namesake
Photo Courtesy of HBO Max
When the first season of HBO Max’s Gossip Girl reboot premiered last year, it tried oh-so-desperately to maintain an uneasy balance between progressive consciousness and messy teen drama to fit in with the modern Gen Z status quo. Unfortunately, that was where they went wrong.
Luckily for us, the second season revels in the chaotic glory of its namesake. So far, the first five episodes available to critics completely understands that what made Gossip Girl so successful in the first place wasn’t its social commentary, but rather the entertainingly reckless antics of the Upper East Side’s elite.
Picking up immediately after the gang’s New Year’s getaway in the Hudson, Season 2 sees Julien (Jordan Alexander) turning over a new leaf, leading her social media influence era with kindness and honesty. She moves in with Zoya (Whitney Peak), who is no longer constricted to her goody-two-shoes status, and her father Nick (Johnathan Fernandez). While she continues her moral policing of everyone else’s actions, it’s nice that Zoya is given room to exist outside of Julien and her friends. The season devotes less time pitting the two sisters against each other with meaningless conflict. Instead of fighting over a boy, their bickering is much more centered around balancing their new home dynamic under the same roof and learning to cohabitate as much more realistic siblings. Zoya’s new friend Shan (Grace Duah) is upped to a series regular this season, and she brings a level of rebellious fun to the mix as she pushes Zoya further out of her comfort zone. It tests the boundaries of her relationship with Nick, who has his own set of secrets and lies he’s keeping from his daughter.
One of the biggest pitfalls of the first season was how each of the episodes felt too neatly wrapped up by the end. Major plotlines were all confined and resolved in one go, almost as if they were structured like a sitcom episode, and it lacked the slow-burn conflict that makes teen dramas so enticing in the first place. The season’s handling of Gossip Girl throuple Aki (Evan Mock), Audrey (Emily Alyn Lind), and Max (Thomas Doherty) also repeats some of the same mistakes made in its first installment. Every single episode thus far sees a new problem emerge and handle itself at once—whether it’s keeping Max in the closet or snooping through Aki’s phone—and it can feel quite repetitive. Nevertheless, it’s refreshing that the season continues to illustrate a healthy polyamorous relationship instead of completely disregarding it for drama, and hopefully the trio are able to explore plotlines beyond general miscommunication.
Gossip Girl’s saving grace is in Monet de Haan (Savannah Lee Smith), the show’s much needed anti-hero. She and Luna (Zion Moreno) were mostly sidelined in the first season, serving as Julien’s left and right hand women dedicated to maintaining her social media empire. But Monet was always destined for more, and Season 2 sees her rising and dethroning Julien as the queen of Constance. It’s enough to make her predecessor Blair Waldorf proud, as Monet is beautiful, malicious, and honestly just a straight-up bitch. She channels all of Blair’s ruthless behavior and dials it up by 100, which makes for a recognizable nod to the original while still feeling fresh. If anything, I would have loved to see Luna be utilized more than as just a neutral middle-man in Julien and Monet’s war, but I digress.