The new 'Gossip Girl' series was doomed to fail because its premise makes no sense in 2021

• The long-awaited new "Gossip Girl" series premiered on HBO Max on July 8.
• This sequel to the iconic teen drama, full of fresh faces, has been retrofitted to appeal to Gen Z.
• Its sense of morality is admirable, but fundamentally incompatible with the premise of the original.

HBO Max's reboot of "Gossip Girl" is, at best, a distant cousin of the original, and at worst, its villainous stepchild.

The new show has been refitted and resized for Gen Z, embellished with new trends and a fresh vocabulary of words that didn't exist when the original premiered well over a decade ago, let alone back when the premise for "Gossip Girl" was initially conceived by Upper East Side born-and-bred Cecily Von Ziegesar in 2002.

As a result, the show's core formula has been dismantled. And the new equation that took its place is left feeling nostalgic and out of place.

For starters, the reboot's major plotlines center around long-lost sisters with matching tattoos, socially-aware Brooklynites, and vindictive high-school teachers trying to take down their students while also turning them into "the Barack Obamas of the world."

It's not hard to imagine the real OG Gossip Girl laughing in the face of the system-serving pawn she's become.

Even if you wanted to like the new "Gossip Girl," there are a few things that stand in the way.

The original show is a relic of a different time

The premise of "Gossip Girl" was developed during social media's infancy, an era when "followers" meant stalkers, "stories" meant narratives, and only a handful of people knew what a meme was.

Against this backdrop, the concept of your every move being tracked and shared online by an anonymous blogger seemed as much like science fiction as it did drama.

In some ways, the original "Gossip Girl" feels like a time capsule.

Although the show came of age in tandem with the rise of social media over the course of its run from 2007 to 2012, the show's characters never embraced it. Aside from a few cheeky references to Facebook and the one-off time in season four when Dan Humphrey created an "I Hate Humphrey" account to troll himself on Twitter, social media was scarcely mentioned.

Rather, the characters' primary modes of communication were dropping in unannounced to each other's apartments, over-abbreviated BlackBerry messages, and of course, Gossip Girl blasts, which served as an early form of cancel culture - the equivalent of having a hashtag with your name in the trending topics on Twitter.

But in the new incarnation of the show, social media isn't just a plot device, it's a character in its own right.

"You have to be strategic about the way you present things to the world," self-described "influencer" Julien Calloway, played by Jordan Alexander, asserts at one point in the sequel series' premiere episode. It's a reminder of how much times have changed. The new show's characters now have control over their narratives; they can communicate directly with more people than Gossip Girl could ever reach, all with the click of a button on a cellphone they carry with them all the time.

Because of this, they don't need to filter the details of their lives through Gossip Girl's eagerly-awaiting fingertips, which raises the question - what is she still doing there?

A socially-conscious 'Gossip Girl' isn't 'Gossip Girl'

It's clear from the first 60 seconds of the new series that this time around, things will be different - not because anyone necessarily wanted it to be, but because it has to be.

There's no denying that the original had plenty of problematic moments and an overall lack of representation. While HBO Max's sequel fixes those issues, it does so at the expense of the very fabric of The CW's "Gossip Girl."

In present-day, wealth, and the people who possess it, have become vilified far more than glamorized, which was the case of the original series. And in this context, "Gossip Girl," as we once knew it, will never have a home.

"These kids wrestle with their privilege in a way that I think the original didn't," coshowrunner Joshua Safran, who also produced the original, told Variety. "In light of [Black Lives Matter], in light of a lot of things, even going back to Occupy Wall Street, things have shifted."

But this self-aware iteration of privilege is also self-defeating. Adding righteousness to the equation only alters the show's inherited blueprint, replacing the attributes that made the original so sensational - and addictive - in the first place with a transparent, and at times desperate, attempt to speak the language of a new generation.

"No slut shaming. No catfights," Safran tweeted in response to a fan question back in May. "Those are not things I believe need to be in this show for it to be fun. Or any show? GG2 is sex positive and our characters use their brains, not their brawn, to take you out!"

Safran's mentions became filled with outraged fans in response.

Their grievances centered around a key theme: At the end of the day, no one was watching "Gossip Girl" 1.0 to listen to brainy, earring-clad Brooklynites talk about marginalized communities or urban gentrification. In fact, characters like Vanessa Abrams, who embodied such liberal affinities were, in later seasons, effectively banished from the show, having agitated the show's fan base (and even the original novels' author) to a point that warranted their removal.

The original show depicted a universe that was neither inviting or relatable, but rather, attractive for being just the opposite. The series masterfully captivated its audience with its uniquely manufactured notions of glamour, exclusivity, and, of course, an unrelenting deluge of convoluted scheming and romantic drama that served as the engine behind the show's six-season cable television run.

In many ways, the changes made to appeal to Gen Z resulted in a show that's more of the anti-'Gossip Girl' than a sequel to it

The vast majority of fans of the original show will never accept the reboot as anything more than an artificial reconstruction overshadowed by nods and allusions to its predecessor. And anyone who wasn't a fan of the original show likely won't be tuning in to begin with.

So did we need a new "Gossip Girl" show? Probably not. But that doesn't mean we won't be watching, hoping for the sequel to find its footing apart from relying on a formula that clearly doesn't work anymore.

(But also, can they just bring Georgina Sparks back already?)