Gossip Girl Reboot Gets Summer Premiere, Showrunner Teases Huge Twist

Are you ready for this, Upper East Siders?

HBO Max will take viewers back into the lives of Manhattan's elite this summer.

That's right, the long-gestating Gossip Girl reboot, or continuation, if you will, will arrive on the streaming service in July.

The news was broke by Cosmopolitan, which also shared a first look at the cast on the cover of their May/June issue.

Have a look for yourself:

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This new take on the franchise stars Jordan Alexander as Julien Calloway, Savannah Smith as Monet de Haan, Zión Moreno as Luna La, Thomas Doherty as Max Wolfe, Emily Alyn Lind as Audrey Hope, Tavi Gevinson as Kate Keller, Eli Brown as Otto "Obie" Bergmann IV, Evan Mock as Akeno "Aki" Menzies, and Whitney Peak as Zoya Lott.

Kristen Bell, who narrated the original 2007-2012, has been confirmed to return.

Here is the official logline:

Eight years after the original website went dark, a new generation of New York private school teens are introduced to the social surveillance of Gossip Girl.

The prestige series will address just how much social media - and the landscape of New York itself - has changed in the intervening years.

The good news for fans of the original is that it will take place in a world where the former characters exist, so it leaves scope for some of them to return.

But it's been almost a decade, so it's possible a lot of these characters will have left the Upper East Side behind.

Hey, it's not like every single one of them liked living there.

The reboot will take place in a post-COVID-19 world, so we shouldn't expect the pandemic to hamper the parties of the rowdy teenagers at the wheel.

Joshua Safran, who shepherded the project, told Cosmopolitan that the new Gossip Girl is not a blog.

“My hope is that we make it to airing and people don’t know," he said.

"I would love to see that conversation happen in the context of people having seen it as opposed to talking about something they haven’t seen.”

The series will also be embracing social media, showing off the caveats of putting your life out there for everyone to see.

“We were shooting a scene in which I had to look at a phone and see nasty comments, and I immediately felt the little heart dagger. I was like, ‘This is literally a prop phone with mean comments about another character,’ but just the very act of seeing them chaotically, one after another, pop up—I was like, ‘I carry around my phone like it’s nothing, but it’s like a ticking bomb,’” Gevinson told the publication.

We're excited about this series. Maybe it's the fact that it won't be forgetting the past.

There's also a top-secret twist on the way, one that should get fans talking.