Did Gossip Girl Lose Its Bite?
The Waves: Gender, Relationships, Feminism
Slate Podcasts
4.2 • 903 Ratings
🗓️ 15 July 2021
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this week’s episode of The Waves, June Thomas, senior managing producer of Slate podcasts and a host of Working, talks with Willa Paskin, Slate TV critic and host of Decoder Ring, about the reboot of Gossip Girl. They discuss how the show messed up by making its characters too nice, why the teachers may be the most interesting part of the reboot, and whether Gossip Girl has finally figured out its class politics.
Recommendations
June: Reality competition show about ball culture, Legendary on HBO Max.
Willa: The Succession meets Agatha Christie new show, The White Lotus on HBO.
Podcast production by Cheyna Roth with editorial oversight by Susan Matthews and June Thomas.
Send your comments and recommendations on what to cover to thewaves@slate.com.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening ad-free on Amazon Music. |
| 0:03.3 | This podcast contains adult language. |
| 0:06.3 | This is the waves. |
| 0:08.1 | This is the waves. |
| 0:09.1 | This is the waves. |
| 0:09.1 | This is the waves. |
| 0:10.9 | This is the waves. |
| 0:11.0 | This is the waves. |
| 0:12.7 | This is the waves. Welcome to The Waves, your one and only source on the scandalous lives of Manhattan elites and gender and feminism. |
| 0:26.9 | Every episode, you get a new pair of feminists to talk about the thing we can't get off our minds. |
| 0:32.2 | And today, you've got me, June Thomas, senior managing producer of the Slate Podcast Network and one of the hosts of working. |
| 0:39.5 | And me, I'm Willa Paskin. I'm Slate's TV critic and I'm also the host of the podcast Decodering. |
| 0:45.7 | This week we'll be talking about Gossip Girl, which is back after nine years away. Obviously, the waves is in no position to complain about reboots, |
| 0:56.3 | but a lot of things have changed in the world over those nine years, |
| 1:00.1 | some of which are reflected in the new show, which is now on HBO Max, |
| 1:04.9 | where you can show asses and say fuck rather than on the CW, where you can't. |
| 1:10.1 | Some of the big changes in American society and the show |
| 1:13.6 | are about power as it plays out around gender, race, and who's really in charge. And the new |
| 1:20.1 | Gossip Girl has not been particularly well reviewed, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say |
| 1:24.4 | that I really like this version. One of the things that I like is that it has |
| 1:29.2 | become a workplace show. As a million blog posts have noted, this time around the identity of |
| 1:34.8 | Gossip Girl was revealed not in the final episode after six or seven seasons or whatever it was |
... |
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