“Hey Upper East Siders, Gossip Girl here.”
If you’re not reading that line in Kristen Bell‘s voice (a.k.a. the voice of Gossip Girl), then you missed out on a crucial, era-defining piece of television that showed us what the world might be like if we were rich, beautiful, and never faced any consequences for our actions that lasted longer than three episodes. Wait. I mean weeks.
The first ever episode of Gossip Girl aired ten years ago today, and co-creators Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, along with executive producer Joshua Safran, sat down with Vulture to reminisce on what never quite made it to screen.
You all probably know that Dan Humphries wasn’t always intended to be Gossip Girl the entire series, or they might never have shoehorned an explainer as to why he posted about his younger sister losing her virginity in the final episode.
Originally, it was going to be Serena‘s younger brother Eric, but that went out the door the second the New York Post leaked it.
Says Safran:
“I always thought it was Eric until the end of season two, and I even guided it that way, but when the New York Post revealed it was Eric — and I still don’t know how that happened, I think they were just guessing — and we realised we couldn’t go down that road anymore, so we abandoned him. Then there was possibly Nate, because we never saw him send anything in to Gossip Girl. But in the end, it had to be Dan, because Dan’s a writer, observer, and could write in different styles.”
The show, which first aired in 2007, suffers the same criticisms that plenty other long-running and beloved shows do: they are blindingly white, and mostly feature heterosexual, cisgender characters.
The Gossip Girl creators certainly regret that they didn’t write more storylines for LGBTQIA people and people of colour, but apart from that, they said they only have one big regret.
Says Safran: “I only regret things like not showing Chuck finger Blair and the dildos and other sexual stuff.”
Holy crap. If Gossip Girl had shown that, I swear to god teen pregnancies would have risen by 200%.
We all know that Chuck and Blair were the real main couple, but it took a few episodes for us (and the creators) to get it. Once they saw the chemistry between Ed Westwick and Leighton Meester, it was game over for the original ‘main’ couple, Dan and Serena.
“As soon as we saw the moment of him and Leighton side-by-side, plotting the downfall of Dan Humphrey, it was like, ‘Oh, this has possibilities beyond where we had started from,’ and we wanted to make that correction quickly,” said Schwartz.
There was also a scene too explicit to make the final cut. “We had a story about Chuck taking care of Blair under a table at Xan’s,” said Safran. “I don’t think we were able to do it, but we hinted at it.”
Other cool shit Schwartz revealed: they tried to film an episode from inside the Met Gala, Katy Perry almost made a cameo, and Jennifer Lawrence really wanted to play Serena (a part that eventually went to Blake Lively).
Oh, and they have no regrets about the (now-infamous) Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. “I’m sure Lily van der Woodsen knows Trump and would have been on the board of charities with him or Melania,” said Schwartz. “That’s the world of Gossip Girl, so to deny it would be wrong.”
Have a read of the full piece here.
