The basic premise sets up not just rivalries among the privileged kids at the New York prep school, but tension between them and their teachers, pushed around by trust-fund tykes confident they won’t suffer any repercussions as long as their parents’ checks clear.
“We own this school,” one of the cool kids sneers. “They work for us.”
A major source of intramural tension, meanwhile, involves the arrival of a new first-year scholarship student (she’s supposed to be 14) named Zoya (Whitney Peak), triggering a haughty response from members of the reigning class, with Julien (Jordan Alexander) as the glamorous queen bee of the group.
Beyond the kids the series assembles several good actors as their parents (Luke Kirby, Laura Benanti and John Benjamin Hickey among them), but they’re still portrayed with roughly the same depth as the incomprehensible grownups in old Charlie Brown cartoons.
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Admittedly, this appraisal doesn’t come from a committed fan of the first “Girl,” but once you get past the title and narration (again provided by Kristen Bell), nods to the maturation of social media and other contemporary touches don’t offer enough of a reset upon which to hang a bejeweled hat.
Of course, the cynical reason for calling the show “Gossip Girl” is that the name recognition offers a significant advantage over, say, “Generic Teen Prep School Soap.”
Mission accomplished on that score. Yet even allowing for that the series demonstrates a lesson its rich brats need to hear — namely, just because you can doesn’t necessarily mean that you should.
“The only thing that makes a story interesting is how it’s told,” Gossip Girl writes at one point. And sometimes, not even that.
“Gossip Girl” premieres July 8 on HBO Max, which, like CNN, is a unit of WarnerMedia.