Even Gossip Girl season 2’s sex-filled plots can’t top Riverdale

On HBO Max’s Gossip Girl reboot/sequel, it’s hard to be in a throuple. There’s some lore here: One of the infamous moments from the original CW version of the show was an impromptu threesome between regular cast members Dan Humphrey (Penn Badgley) and Vanessa Abrams (Jessica Szohr) and recurring guest star Olivia (Hilary Duff), all set to a hilarious cover of T.I.’s “Whatever You Like.”

New Gossip GirlThe show, which is no longer subject to the broadcast standard of television networks, starts its second season with three friends. The show isn’t interested in being just lewder, but deeper: Friends turned lovers Aki (Evan Mock), Obie (Eli Brown), and Audrey (Emily Alyn Lind) spend the first few episodes of season 2 hooking up and trying to figure out how to make their throuple WorkAs a true relationship. Naturally, they are bad at it, which makes for great hijinks — a word that would’ve been hard to apply to the first season of Gossip Girl.

Around the iconic teen drama series, the world has been transformed. HBO Max, a series about an elite group of students at the same Upper East Side school where the original TV show was set, attempts to recognize this. Gen Z teens can’t flaunt wealth the same way their millennial predecessors did; it’s far too gauche. So they dress up their power jockeying and petty rivalries with lip service to structural inequality and climate activism, and it’s mostly fine, even though the real draw is the throuple hijinks.

Photo: Barbara Nitke/HBO Max

Unfortunately, even ThisIt might not be enough. It is possible to be too much. Riverdale world now, baby, and it’s hard for a teen drama that once traded in outrageous antics to keep up when Riverdale is out there… doing MidsommarOn a weekly basis. The Overton Window of Teen Troublemaking is now completely different. There are many factors that influence the effectiveness of this technique. Gossip GirlWriters want to write a story about a triplet. It’s so charming. Veronica Lodge ran a speakeasy/casino in a diner basement while all of her friends were trapped in a murderous game of Dungeons & Dragons.

Gossip Girl isn’t bad.Instead, season 2 will bring a crucial status quo reshuffle to the show. Season 1’s artificial rivalry between Queen Bee influencer JC, (Jordan Alexander), and her sister Zoya, (Whitney Peak), has been replaced by something. Much more more fun: Namely, JC’s former sidekick Monet (Savannah Lee Smith) is tired of playing second fiddle, and tries increasingly desperate ways of orchestrating a feud with the hilariously disinterested JC. And in an interesting twist, the identity of Gossip Girl, the anonymous poster who dishes on the prep school students’ big secrets, is up for grabs.

No matter what Gossip Girl’s second season change-up is enough for you largely depends on what you expect from a modern teen drama. Riverdale began an arms race — one that it could not even keep up with, given how exhausting it could be to watch religiously — but arguably primed the pump for a show like EuphoriaThe show continues to expose the sexuality and drug use that other scandal-fuelled teen programs could not. Perhaps Gossip Girl’s playful voice (still Kristen Bell’s just like in the original show) could bring the teen drama back down to Earth — or find a new normal somewhere in its throupled mania.

Two episodes from the initial two seasons of Gossip GirlSeason 2 is now available on HBO Max. New episodes air weekly on Thursdays.