Queens of mean
BBC1, 10.35pm
THIS American teen drama, which premiered in 2007 and ran for five years, became a pop culture classic and this revival has been hotly anticipated.
The original – which you can rewatch on BBC iPlayer – was narrated by the unknown blogger “Gossip Girl”, voiced by Kristen Bell.
She recounted the lives of the privileged upper-class teens living in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. There were It Girls, golden boys, bullies, backstabbers and socialites, with endless obnoxious people.
You can expect much of the same in this reboot, which stars Jordan Alexander, Eli Brown, Thomas Doherty, Tavi Gevinson and Emily Alyn Lind among its young and beautiful cast.
The new Gossip Girl explores just how much social media – and the landscape of New York City – has changed in the intervening years.
We’re back to the Upper East Side where a new generation of New York private school teens are being introduced to social surveillance, nine years after the original blogger’s website went dark.
It’s a place heaving with tension, where the wrong pair of trainers or handbag could leave you a social pariah and where the students have way more power over teachers than they should have.
“We own this school, they work for us,” says influencer Julien (Alexander).
The staff at the school live in fear of the clique of mean girls (and boys), but are thrilled to learn of a decade-old blog that used to fill the halls with gossip.
But the teachers are about to rise up... and the fallout will mean high teen drama.