Good Trash Isn’t Easy to Make
The Gossip Girl Revival and It’s Faux-Wokness Falls Flats
Has anyone else been love/hate-watching the reboot of Gossip Girl? Because I know I have. I love-watch it because I’m a fiend for fashion that pushes the envelope and just about anything set in New York City. I hate-watch it because I’m truly trying to figure it out.
Making trashy TV is much harder than it looks. The scripts are usually sorely lacking, and the actors need to deliver their lines with just enough earnestness and camp. Trash TV requires a certain penchant for drama without consequence; a sort of suspended disbelief that allows us to imagine a world where rich superficial socialites get away with everything from underage drinking to murder.
Or as Linda Holmes writes for NPR, this specific type of shitty TV “has an internal logic: wrongs are avenged, parties are disrupted, beautiful consenting adults rarely close the door on the possibility of having sex with each other, meanies can have a change of heart if they’re really loved, and it only rains when people need to get stuck indoors to dry off naked.”
What the Gossip Girl revival has that the original certainly did not have is diversity. The original was blatantly white and rich and heteronormative — after all, it was the early aughts and everyone still…
