Gather ‘round, Upper East Siders. The new Gossip Girl is back for season 2, and we’re here to share everything you need to know about what this latest crop of Manhattan’s elite have been up to lately, from betrayals to battles for queen bee.
Teen Vogue can exclusively share that Gossip Girl season 2 will premiere on Dec. 1 on HBOMax, and it will feature the return of Julien (Jordan Alexander), Zoya (Whitney Peak), Obie (Eli Brown), Audrey (Emily Alyn Lind), Max (Thomas Doherty), Aki (Evan Mock), Monet (Savannah Lee Smith), Luna (Zion Moreno), and all the characters you grew to love — or hate — in the first season.
Season 2 picks up where season 1 left off, with Julien — still reeling from her father’s Me Too moment — teaming up with Gossip Girl (led by Tavi Gevinson’s meddling teacher Kate Keller) in a partnership almost guaranteed to end in disaster for both parties. Zoya is still a clear outsider, determined to build a life for herself outside the Constance It girls. Audrey, Max, and Aki embark on the joys and difficulties of their polyamorous relationship. Monet and Luna are plotting away for a hostile takeover.
Showrunner and executive producer Josh Safran, who worked on the original show, has been excited for season 2 since the beginning. He and the writers room needed to lay the groundwork in the first season, introduce these new characters, and rebuild the world of the original in a new context. Season 1 had to feel different. Safran vividly remembers the response to when he said there would be “no catfights,” but all bets are off for season 2.
“I always knew that if we got to a season two, the characters themselves, now that they have been manipulated by Gossip Girl for a full season, would start to play into Gossip Girl’s hand,” Safran says. “That would be the place for us to go back to doing that stuff that the first show did so well because we would’ve, A) established ourselves as our own entity, but, B) if you’re a group of teenagers and Gossip Girl is screwing with you, it took a while for Blair and Serena even to fall into… they weren’t pushing each other into the Seine or into fountains early. That was because Gossip Girl’s influence gets to you so much that it amps you up, and that’s season two … There are catfights, and people get pushed into a fountain.”
And where there are catfights, there’s an original series character returning to the show: Georgina Sparks, played by the inimitable Michelle Trachtenberg. An agent of chaos, a plot catalyst, an icon in her own right, Georgina will inject some much-needed mastermind behavior into Gossip Girl season 2.
“What she brought to the original series was anarchy,” Safran says. “She’s an anarchist. She’ll just do anything and just for any reason she decides. So we brought that energy to the first show, and then we brought that energy back to this one. She’s the same, and that’s what I think is so fun, that Michelle is older, we’re all older, Georgina is older yet has the exact same energy. She’s out of time.” He adds about Trachtenberg returning to the role, “Michelle inhabits that role so fully and so thoughtfully and just knows what she’s there to do, knows how she fits into this universe.”