‘Gossip Girl’ Showrunner Breaks Down That Scandalous Part 1 Finale

It wouldn’t be Gossip Girl if it didn’t end in a bang — in this case, literally. This week marks the premiere of Gossip Girl Episode 6, the final installment in Part 1 of HBO Max’s first season. And it’s a midseason finale that will not disappoint fans.

Betrayal, protests, threesomes, it’s all there. And series developer and executive producer Joshua Safran broke it all down for Decider. Safran explained why this new reboot is more similar to the original than you may realize, what’s going on with our two favorite love triangles, and what his read is on Rafa and Max’s very scandalous and very illegal relationship. Needless to say, we’re now more prepared than ever for Part 2. Spoilers ahead for Gossip Girl Episode 6. 

Decider: This reboot feels like old Gossip Girl, just completely wild in a really fun way. What have you seen or learned from the feedback from fans?

Joshua Safran: I’m trying to not pay too much attention to that, because the season is done and there’s not really much that can be done about it. We’re just making the show that we all are enjoying making. The hope is that the audience enjoys it as we do.

Though, the one thing that I read somewhere — I always read one comment, and you’re like, “Oh, I’m gonna stay offline” — and the one comment that I read was that the story is resolved too much at the end of episodes. It is just so funny to me. The original, in the first season, we didn’t do we didn’t do cliffhangers every episode. We did give characters stuff to do that was going to continue and keep going. But the girls made up in Episode 4 of Season 1. So the girls (in the reboot) make up in Episode 4 like that. The only sort of continued drama was Blair [Leighton Meester] not liking Jenny [Taylor Momsen] and constantly trying to keep Jenny down. And we have that with Monet [Savannah Smith], Luna [Zión Moreno], and Zoya [Whitney Peak]. I read that comment, and this funny thing, which I’ve talked about before with the other writers from this show and from the original, is that when the original aired, people liked Season 1 and 2. Then they thought Season 3 through whatever went off-the-rails quote, unquote, because it got so twisty. It’s funny that now the world is caught up more with that way of storytelling, some people want more of that off-the-rails version of Gossip Girl.

In my mind, once we get to Seasons 3 through 6, there’s always a way to do that. But I’m structuring this more like the books, like the original series, where you really get to know these characters. They feel very grounded. You really fall in love with them. So that later on when bigger things happen to them, you understand who they are when they happen, as opposed to just before you get to know them, you know, spinning them around in circles all the time… By the way, the first time around, people were like, “We hate this.” So you know, that’s definitely not a place I want to be in. So instead, I looked to the original show and how much you really got to know these people and how much you really got to live in the pain of real things that happened. Blair losing her virginity or realizing her best friend slept with her boyfriend. These are real things. So that worked out. That’s the only real criticism that I read briefly, and then I was like, “What? Go back and watch the original.”

Watching the reboot, I kind of felt a shift from Episodes 3 to 4 where the characters feel a little sharper, and the world feels a little crisper. Was there a change in the writers room or am I just making things up?

I would hate to say that you’re just making things up, but there was no change. Honestly, it simply is that you have to do so much setup in a pilot that you just can’t get to that lighter, faster way of telling stories. People forget that the original was based on characters from books, and people did know the books. Not everybody who watched the pilot originally read the books, but those were characters that were in the world a little bit and people were talking about them in relation to the how they had been portrayed in the books when the show first came out.

In this one, we had all new characters, all new dynamics. Also, I had to show how it references the original so that you understood it was the same world. You couldn’t just drop in and have a good time with everybody. Plus, COVID happened. So it was after COVID, there was just so much setup. I think once you get to Episode 3, the setup’s over and you can just live with them. That’s all that really happened to me. Most people say it takes, what? Three or four episodes of a show to really get like — that’s where they look at who’s still watching. When you look at binge (watching) and stuff, it’s who makes it past Episode 3. It’s because it takes three episodes. Episode 1 is the pilot. Episode 2 has to reset some of the things from the pilot, just in case you didn’t watch Episode 1, or just in case you didn’t pay attention. But then you get to three and you’re like, “OK, cool. The road’s open.”

Watching this show right after the original Gossip Girl, most of the characters in this new one feel a little, for lack of a better word, nicer. I think a big part of that is because Julien keeps Monet and Luna at bay a lot of the time. Is it more difficult to write a drama-centric show where the plots resolve and everyone’s trying generally to be good?

I think the first time around everyone was pretty good, with the exception of Chuck [Ed Westwick]. Serena [Blake Lively] really was trying to be good. She came back very much trying to be good. And Dan [Penn Badgley] — obviously, we know he was the most evil of all — but at the time, he was very good. Nate [Chace Crawford] was also very good and made one mistake but was really trying hard to not pay for it. Jenny started with very noble intentions.

I don’t actually think these characters are in fact nicer. I think, in some ways, they’re a little bit worse because they wear their goodness on their sleeves. Whereas the first time around, the characters were just really trying to be good and were lost. Maybe that’s the true difference is that Gen Z is not lost the way that the original characters were lost. They have more of an awareness of their surroundings and who they are in the world and who their families are. Every generation gets the Gossip Girl that’s right for its world, and it would have been wrong to not have them be so self-aware. That doesn’t mean that they’re right, but that’s just that’s how they’re starting out.

That makes a lot of sense. Speaking to the whole “every generation gets the Gossip Girl that it needs or deserves,” you’ve said in the past that the teacher/student relationship that appears in a lot of YA dramas is morally wrong. How do you think the Rafa [Jason Gotay] / Max [Thomas Doherty] relationship inverts that dynamic, especially by the end of Episode 6 when they’re kind of rivals?

I don’t want to say too much about it, because I think it’s pretty clear in the story. But Rafa doesn’t think he’s done anything wrong, and he clearly has. With Max, Max has to grow up and go through something. For some reason, for Max, it seems OK that it’s just him. But then when he hears it’s others as well, it’s suddenly a problem, which is a young thing to think. Why did he think it was OK if it was just him? But everybody has their eyes opened at a certain point. That opens Max’s eyes, and then he realizes that what Rafa is doing is wrong. Now it’s just a question of will Rafa realize that or not, and what will he do? That’s something you’ll see. But yeah, I feel like the story tells itself. It’s definitely a long way from the Rachel Carr [Laura Breckenridge] story from the first show.

To shift gears a little bit, I wanted to talk about the threesome. When Episode 6 ended, it felt like it was perfect for Aki, Audrey and Max to be together. Was that always in mind?

Their storyline continues to be complicated and connected, and you’ll get to see what exactly transpired after that. In the very next episode, we’ll get to see when it’s happening in terms of if there’s any fallout from that experience or not, or if that experience even comes to fruition. So stay tuned on that one. But yes, their storyline is connected now and probably forever.

Speaking of another couple, Julien [Jordan Alexander] and Obie [Eli Brown] kiss, which is a big, explosive moment in the final episode of Part 1. Can you walk me through the emotions surrounding that kiss?

The audience is also probably aware of this now, but Julien and Obie had a longstanding relationship, but they both sort of lost sight of each other. Obie didn’t like who he perceived Julian to become, and Julien maybe took him for granted a little bit. So when this person shows up who reminds Obie, maybe a little bit of a version of Julien that he wants, the question now becomes is that connection real? Or was that connection a bit of smoke and mirrors hiding the fact that he is still connected to Julien? It wouldn’t be Gossip Girl without triangles, so yeah. You’re gonna see and learn a lot more about that in the next episode.

Throughout the season there have been nods to current events. There’s an episode that has gun violence, and Episode 6 has protesting as part of a major arc. But these episodes aren’t completely centered around these issues. They’re just things happening in the background of these kids lives. How do you find that balance?

We looked at all the issues that people are dealing with, the things that are in our world today. It was just a way in which to feather them into the episodes. When you look back at the original, they’re dealing with real stuff too. At that time, Ponzi schemes and stuff that was affecting the rich world of the characters’ back then is in the show. And student/teacher relationships, obviously, back then there’s a couple of them on the first show.

That just blew me away, the list of things that we felt the show would touch upon. We wanted to be accurate in the future. It would be wrong to not talk about protests and social uprising within this world, because with Gossip Girl, we try to make the world real. It’s fantasy, but it’s a fantasy in inside a real construct. Like Serena and Blair went to Bergdorf and Bendel’s, and they wanted to go to the Met Gala. They were in the real world. It’s just that it’s a heightened version of the real world.

I completely forgot about the Ponzi storyline in the original Gossip Girl. But yeah, that was all right there.

There’s actually a bunch of real plot lines. There’s Nate’s dad, who’s part of an embezzlement scheme, Poppy Lifton [Tamara Feldman] and Armie Hammer’s characters who run the Ponzi scheme. There was always stuff based in fact. We always looked at current events in the sort of Law & Order way and found a way to put them into the show.

You’ve said in the past that you wanted to use this reboot to explore what goes into being Gossip Girl. What have you learned through Kate [Tavi Gevinson] about what it takes to be Gossip Girl?

She’s really playing God, she and the other teachers. And when you play God, no one can play God, and it corrupts you. We’re not really telling a story about how absolute power corrupts absolutely, though that is definitely very true. But that’s not actually what this is. This is the story of a person who believes they know what’s right. Then they operate from a place of what’s right, without ever fully acknowledging that no one knows what’s right… She’s constantly struggling with this, these things popping up that she wasn’t aware would be issues. She thought it would just be so clean and easy. And she’s yet to fully reckon with her own realization that maybe this isn’t good or right. It’s like you have to do bad to do good; sometimes I think it’s kind of what Kate would believe. But maybe the goal of life is actually, “Hey, how about you just don’t do bad?”

Watch Gossip Girl (2021) on HBO Max