Like a Betty and Veronica for a new age of entitlement, the main characters Serena van Der Woodsen and Blair Waldorf-one a “boho” by billionaire’s standards, the other a full-tilt Bendel’s girl-managed to keep readers (and, later, television watchers) simultaneously rooting for and against them. (“The only way to tolerate the city in August is to get naked,” one memorably opined.) This is not a story about people who are fabulous by dint of fame or talent they are merely, perfectly, to the Museum Mile born. This is an outrageous milieu populated by wealthy naval captains, lesbian headmistresses, and gorgeous teenagers whose internal monologues are master classes in cynicism. They’re addictively wicked, with prose as arch and merciless as the world that they satirize.

If the original Gossip Girl television show went down like candy, the books worked on us more like drugs-and not because of the toxins that coursed through the pages. The cast of the new Gossip Girl series, which premieres July 8 on HBO Max.

The coronavirus pandemic hit days before the production had started filming, delaying a release date until summer 2021, yet the network was so bullish it placed an order for an additional 10 episodes before they’d wrapped the first season. Meanwhile, a 10-episode reboot of the cult television show, helmed by original producers Stephanie Savage and Josh Schwartz and written by original head writer Joshua Safran, debuts July 8 on HBO Max. Decades after its initial detonation, Gossip Girl, that ur text of Upper East Side excess and laissez-faire mores, shows no signs of dying down.Ĭoming on 20 years after publishing the first installment in the franchise, publisher Little Brown has reissued author Cecily von Ziegesar’s first three books with cover art whose chicly flat depictions look like Alex Katz prints than knapsack contraband. And yet… our love of mean girls in Manolos is hard to give up. The closest we’ve got to garden-variety teenage tyrants are woke celebrities with late-night trolling tendencies, and we all know how that’s going. As the great reckoning of our modern moment roils on, privilege is a filthy word and bullying is firmly out of fashion.

It Had to Be You by Cecily von Ziegesar