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Mireille Duhon
Suffering from a post-Killing Eve ennui, I knew I needed something equally as funny, violent, emotionally intense and addictive to binge. A few friends had suggested that I watch You on Netflix and, while skeptical, one glimpse at Penn Badgley's cheekbones had my interest peaked. So I charged up my vape, grabbed a bag of Veggie Chips (anyone who says they're disgusting doesn't love themself), slipped on my Uggs and fired up the ol' Netflix cue. Reader, I was not disappointed.
You, which premiered on Lifetime in September before moving to Netflix, follows Joe (Badgley, looking somehow as young, if not younger, than he did on Gossip Girl) a New York City bookstore manager who meets MFA student and aspiring Guinevere Beck (Elizabeth Lail) and quickly becomes obsessed with her -- like, really obsessed. After continually stalking Beck, Joe finds himself saving her life when she drunkenly stumbles onto the subway tracks. He then steals her phone and begins to infiltrate her life, identifying the people he believes to be obstacles to their love: namely her douchey boyfriend and her best friend Peach Salinger (Shay Mitchell and yes, she related to that Salinger). Once Joe and Beck actually start dating, his obsession starts to rack up a body count as his love gets deeper and even more twisted.
You first hooked me with it's sharp writing and the way it revelled in the myopia of millennial culture. There's no reason Joe should be so obsessed with Beck (besides her being hot). She's completely self-obsessed, buying her friends expensive gifts so she'll seem together, lying about her family trauma to seem more interesting, and hooking up with trust fund losers in the attempt that one of them will introduce her to the high-profile life she's looking for The show also finds the perfect balance of romanticizing Joe's stalking while keeping you fully aware of what a creep he is. The novel of the same name that the show is based on (by Caroline Kepnes) may have predated #MeToo, but the show is clearly enjoying setting up Joe as a protagonist who exemplifies every horrible thing men do, and despite that, we can't help but root for him.
The show is also pretty gay. Mitchell's Peach, who spends her time on screen delivering deliciously bitchy barbs in skintight jeans and expensive furs, is almost as obsessed with Beck as Joe is. Later in the season, Joe starts seeing Beck's therapist (a bearded and insanely hot John Stamos) when he suspects she's cheating and recasts Beck as his boyfriend when describing their relationship troubles.
The show also features Out covergirl Hari Nef as Beck's fellow graduate student and frenemy who delivers brilliantly acerbic lines like "You're not J.K. Rowling.We'll all be fine if you want to take a time out," when she decides Beck needs a social media hiatus. Nef's Blythe is at once maddening and hilariously nasty. "I have this facial autism thing where I can't hide what I'm thinking," she says while preparing to read Beck's latest attempt at prose during a workshop.
You seems to exist in the same universe as Gossip Girl, but the teenage sociopaths have graduated from social evisceration to actual murder. If you're looking for the perfect 10-hour binge watch full of pretty people doing horrible things to each other, You is it.
The person on the Netflix marketing team who came up with the idea to brand Elite as the Spanish Gossip Girl should probably be awarded that big, hideous trophy from the show, because the comparison is pretty apt. In Elite, three working class students are transferred to a ritzy prep school, where they're forced to navigate snobbery, sex, and plenty of scandal. But before you spurn Elite for lack of originality or refuse to watch it out of deference to its predecessor, I'm here to inform you, former Upper East Siders, that when it comes to a few key points, Elite is actually better than Gossip Girl.
It's no secret that most of the lines on Gossip Girl were served with extra cheese. Not that it makes them any less terrific, but it does make it hard to watch with anyone who's not a diehard GG-er themselves.
The dialogue on Elite is equally corny, but everything just sounds so much smoother in Spanish. When Blair and Nate used to say "always have, always will" like every five seconds, I almost got a cavity from the saccharine sweetness of it all. But when Carla tells Polo that she loves him "mas que nunca," it just sounds so much cooler and more sophisticated.
The episode where Dan, Vanessa, and Olivia (played by Hilary Duff) decide to make Olivia's last night at NYU one to remember by engaging in a good ol' fashioned menage-a-trois was iconic. But while the episode might have been groundbreakingly risqu, it was also more than a little problematic.
The entire Gossip Girl threesome happens merely so that Dan can realize that he doesn't really like Olivia after all, and would rather be with Vanessa instead. That's not exactly fair to either of the women involved, both of whom already understood their feelings before they jumped into bed together.
Carla, Polo, and Christian's relationship is much more nuanced. All three of them clearly understand the rules of their situation, and why they're doing it: Carla and Polo are endgame, and they want to spice things up, while Christian is in it for the sex and the networking opportunities. And while at first it seems like Carla's the glue holding them together, the situation escalates beyond that, as illustrated in the soon-to-be iconic moment when Carla flips off her mother the marchioness while Polo and Christian French kiss in the background. Everyone is getting something out of this relationship.
As I mentioned, I will always be a loyal Serena fan, but the girl messed up a lot. Like, a lot. She repeatedly made bad decisions: partying way too hard, having an affair with a married man, bailing on her friends, lying non-stop. The list goes on. But still, whenever she had been especially awful and gotten herself into real trouble, her friends would show up to save her beautiful butt, no matter what she'd done to them.
Marina, on the other hand, jumped head-first into an extremely Serena-like spiral by the end of Elite Season 1, making some pretty ill-advised decisions and betraying most of her family and friends in the process. And in the end... well, there was no one there to save her. I'm not saying that the punishment fit the crime, but it was a more interesting storytelling choice to have Marina's terrible choices catch up with her, rather than to save her just because she's so beautiful and sweet. In this sense, Elite wasn't afraid to take a storytelling risk that Gossip Girl never could.
When it came to setting up each season, Gossip Girl had a challenge in adhering to the strict network guidelines of 24 episodes of 40 minutes each. But thanks to Netflix's flexibility, Elite had more freedom to tailor its length and number of episodes to fit the story it wanted to tell. The result is a season that's jam-packed with drama and plot twists.
In an interview with Variety, Elite producer Francisco Ramos explained that he's enjoying the creative flexibility that comes with making TV for a streaming platform. "This is a lot of fun," he said. "With the golden age of series, I can now achieve in TV what I wanted to do with movies in the last few years."
No one does drama better than high schoolers, so it makes sense that the high-pressure settings of elite prep schools consistently make for entertaining stories. While Elite might invite plenty of comparisons to Gossip Girl, Gossip Girl itself wasn't without its own inspiration. Author Cecily Von Ziegesar admitted to New York magazine that she actually took the inspiration for her book series from Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence. And Age of Innocence no doubt had its influencers before that.
Then we have young Daphne Bridgerton, played by Phoebe Dynevor, who knows nothing about what comes after marriage. She is a young and innocent girl who only wants to marry and have children but knows nothing more about it.
Then of course we have Lady Whistledown. Now we all know of Gossip Girl (2007), starring Blake Lively and Leighton Meester. Bridgerton is almost the same concept but without the threat of spilling secrets over social media. Instead, gossip is spilled through weekly newsletters.
Aside from the casting and plot, we have lavish balls, we get sights of beautiful gardens and even traditional ballroom dancing. The costumes and props are also extravagant pieces, with long babydoll dresses, feather fans and might I say spoons that add to story-telling and setting.
The cultural impact of Gossip Girl cannot be overstated. The teen drama, which followed the messy inner lives of a group of rich Upper East Side students and the ruthless, anonymous blogger who reported on their every move, ran from 2007-2012, and there have been plenty of shows since that have drawn inspiration from its brand of sexy melodrama. It was enough of a sensation to spawn a sequel series on HBO Max, also called Gossip Girl, which will return for Season 2 sometime in the (hopefully) near future.
Obviously, the first thing any Gossip Girl obsessive should check out is HBO Max's reboot, which follows a whole new group of obscenely rich Upper East Side high school students, who are thrown for a loop when a mysterious new girl enters the picture to shake everything up. This is an updated, more self-aware, more politically in-touch Gossip Girl, and while it may not be the same kind of unequivocal hit the original was, if you were a fan of the original, it'll keep you hooked. And don't worry, Kristen Bell returns as the voice of Gossip Girl herself, who's always watching. -Allison Picurro
Euphoria is the kind of show that'll make you say, "I'm never having kids!" Sam Levinson's gloriously messy, semi-autobiographical series centers around Rue (Zendaya), a high school student fresh out of rehab who has no intention of staying sober, and her toxic friendship with Jules (Hunter Schafer). Rue, Jules, and their classmates party, do drugs, and engage in general debauchery as they struggle to find themselves, but the show is so lovingly empathetic of their uniquely teenage despair while also having some of the best cinematography on television. Few shows on TV can promise an Emmy-winning performance from Zendaya and a storyline involving One Direction fanfiction. It's much, much darker than either of the Gossip Girls, but if you grew up watching GG, you're now in Euphoria's target demographic. -Allison Picurro
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