Gossip Girl’s reboot premieres with a shocking twist by revealing the identity of the blogger

The Gossip Girl reboot premiered on Thursday with a shocking reveal. 

For its entire six season run, the original CW show’s central mystery revolved around who was behind a blog that dished out the scandalous secrets of the privileged teenagers attending an exclusive private school in Manhattan. 

However, viewers of the HBO Max reboot learned the identity of Gossip Girl in the first episode.

The show’s eponymous blogger was revealed to be a group of the high school’s teachers, led by Kate Keller (Tavi Gevinson).

Early in the premiere, Kate accidentally bumps into the school’s Queen B Julien (Jordan Alexander) and is ridiculed by Julien and her clique. Kate then storms into the teacher’s lounge to vent about the entitled behavior of the spoiled students at Constance Billiard to her fellow teachers.

Upon hearing about Gossip Girl’s notorious blog from another teacher, Kate and several teachers begin scouring through the site that had exposed the juicy goings-on at the ritzy school and intimidated its past attendees.

Kate and some of the other teachers are inspired to revive Gossip Girl in order to hold sway over their rude and recalcitrant students and their indulgent parents.

After their initial attempts to recreate Gossip Girl as a Twitter account fail to take off, Kate and the teachers launch an Instagram page. 

Kate and her colleagues begin spying on the students and posting photos of their sordid exploits. After the Gossip Girl account zeros in on the drama between Julien and her half-sister, Zola ( Whitney Peak), who is new to the school, the page’s popularity explodes. 

The creator of the original series, Joshua Safran, who is serving as the showrunner for the reboot, discussed the decision-making behind the surprising twist during an interview with Variety. 

He explained, ‘I have friends who work in the private schools of the Upper East Side and Upper West Side. And I went to one, obviously. I often thought since the first Gossip Girl ended that there was maybe a show in teachers at these rarefied schools, but I never landed on anything. 

‘And then I was talking to my friends a couple of years ago, just about the small changes that they had noticed in the students’ parents in the years they were teaching there.

Safran went on to say, ‘I can’t remember whether I first knew that there would be teachers and a teacher would be Gossip Girl, or whether I knew first that I would know who Gossip Girl was and it would be a teacher. 

‘The two were so neck-and-neck for me. I was also very interested in looking at roads we hadn’t explored the first time around, and teachers — that was a whole area. Especially private school teachers who are younger than public school teachers, who make less money than public school teachers, who come out of college and are not so removed from the age of the students that they’re teaching. All of that combined just felt like really fertile territory.’  

He also addressed the potential ramifications that becoming Gossip Girl might have on the teachers. ‘It’s a be-careful-what-you-wish-for story,’ Safran said. ‘It’s a cautionary tale. We will be tracking not just what Gossip Girl does to the kids, but what being Gossip Girl does to them. 

‘And it is incredibly messy and morally compromised, obviously.’