Gossip Girl renewed for season 2 at HBO Max

Rest easy Upper East Siders. HBO Max’s Gossip Girl sequel series is here to stay. It has been announced that the streamer has renewed the series for a second season. The update of the former CW series will return in November for the back half of its first season.

HBO Max says Gossip Girl, which premiered July 8, had the best launch for an HBO Max original this year. Despite this assertion, no hard data has been released to support this, as is the case with most streaming services, so we’ll have to take their word on that. Samba TV, which is a third-party service, reported that the first episode premiered to 555,000 U.S. households. Judging from social media response, it does appear the show is striking a chord with its target audience and it did trend week-to-week when a new episode would drop. That is the real measure of success with a show like this.

The new Gossip Girl is written by showrunner Joshua Safran and is based on the book by Cecily von Ziegesar, which also inspired the original series. On the reboot, eight years have gone by since the original Gossip Girl website went dark and a new generation of New York private school teens is introduced to the social surveillance of Gossip Girl. The new version of the show allows the creators to address how much social media and the landscape of New York itself have changed in the intervening years. The series stars Jordan Alexander, Thomas Doherty, Tavi Gevinson, Emily Alyn Lind, Evan Mock, Zion Moreno, Whitney Peak, Savannah Lee Smith, Todd Almond, Adam Chanler-Berat, Johnathan Fernandez, and Jason Gotay, while Kristen Bell returns as the voice of Gossip Girl.

I wasn’t sold on the show after the first episode, since the original series is a guilty pleasure favorite of mine, but the series did get better with subsequent episodes as it began to find its own voice. I’m looking forward to what a new season has to offer.

Have YOU been watching Gossip Girl?