Pretty Little Gossip Liar Girls
Everyone loves a remake on HBO of a good teen surveillance murder mystery
I’ve always loved the literary concept of gothic doubling. Closely linked to the concept of the doppelganger, gothic doubling is a literary device in which the two halves of a character’s personality are manifested into two beings. Think, for example, of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dr. Frankenstein and his monster, Lucy and Mina. The concept has endured, showing up in horror movies, psychological dramas, and teen mysteries; the original Pretty Little Liars, for example, used several sets of twins to cause gothic spookiness and murderous hijinks. The purpose of a gothic double is to have a character meet a physical manifestation of the darkness within them. To hold a mirror up and really see yourself.
Because we live in an extremely meta world, the most interesting instance of this I’ve seen recently involves not two characters, but two TV shows. Both these shows began their lives as teen-centric mysteries, both are based on a series of books, both are primarily about the toxicity and unpredictable power of teenage girl friendships, both involve a mysterious digital tormentor, and both were remade this year by HBO Max. That’s right readers; I am talking about Gossip Girl and Pretty Little Liars.
Once upon a time, it was 2010. Gossip Girl was in its third season (the one with the inexplicable Hilary Duff threesome) and Pretty Little Liars was premiering on ABC Family. The world was in the midst of a global financial crisis and we disaffected youth apparently wanted nothing more than to get sucked into a weird convoluted mystery series about an anonymous digital presence tormenting a bunch of wealthy pretty people.
For the uninitiated, Gossip Girl is about a group of wealthy high schoolers who, at the beginning of the school year, begin to receive email blasts from someone calling themselves “Gossip Girl” who, you guessed it, knows a lot of gossip about everyone. Gossip Girl becomes a kind of all-encompassing digital surveillance state for our characters, with students spying on each other to submit the juiciest gossip until no one could make a move without it being reported on the site. To a present-day reader, this likely sounds pernicious enough to warrant calling in the authorities, but within the show, Gossip Girl always functioned more like a slightly bitchy narrator.
Pretty Little Liars took this formula and made it sinister. Focusing on a group of five teenage girls, the series begins one year after the disappearance of Alison DiLaurentis, the leader of their friend group. Alison was a mean girl who loved to hold everyone’s secrets hostage and when her body is found in the pilot, there is no shortage of suspects. At Alison’s funeral the girls all receive a mysterious text from someone threatening to reveal their lies and secrets- soemone calling themselves “A.” Is it A for Alison? For Anonymous? And how does A know so much about our little liars? As the series progresses and becomes more and more bonkers, A remains the central narrative force, puppet-mastering everyone in and out of perilous situations and intricate Saw-like traps.
Both of these shows became cultural juggernauts within their separate, but related, spheres. Although Gossip Girl was never a ratings leader for the CW during its run (and saw consistent declines throughout its five seasons), it has remained one of the most culturally influential and talked-about shows the CW ever produced. In contrast, Pretty Little Liars remains the most-watched show ABC Family (now Freeform) has ever produced. There have been multiple attempts to remake PLL or extend the PLL universe, with HBO Max’s version (PLL: Original Sin) being the most successful. PLL remains a cult classic for people born in the late 80s/early 90s. It’s sort of our Twin Peaks crossed with Clueless. It was no surprise, then, that in the great remake wars, HBO Max snapped up the rights to both these universes. The results have been… revealing.
In an “Emergency Discussion” post from mid-August of 2021, two Vulture writers simply asked “WTF Happened to Gossip Girl?” The new series had premiered on HBO Max at the beginning of July to cautious optimism from critics and fans alike. Some major updates to the original concept were immediately apparent: there were more queer characters, characters of color, and more socially conscious storylines. The original Gossip Girl had been pretty blasé about its core concept; although there were occasional hunts to unmask or shut down Gossip Girl, the show never treated her existence like a truly bad thing. Instead, the Gossip Girl/narrator voice always maintained a sardonic distance from the people she watched. By extension, so did we as viewers. The new series directly confronts the dark implications of having a surveillance figure like that in a high-pressure environment like a wealthy and exclusive high school. Among other things, Gossip Girl causes one student to bring a gun to class in an early episode. Unfortunately, the writing was so spotty and inconsistent that even such a weighty incident as that is never addressed in the narrative properly. The problems with the new Gossip Girl are the problems my essays address over and over again: unreliable stakes, sloppy character development, and untrustworthy storytelling. In a series like Stranger Things there’s so much going on beyond the storytelling that showrunners can get away with putting an 80s power ballad underneath a visually arresting scene and calling it character development. In a series that’s mainly about beautiful people in Gucci talking to each other a lot, that technique just falls flat. As it should.
On the other hand, Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin has been a surprise highlight of HBO Max’s original content schedule. The series is darker, more violent, and chock full of actual swearing (believe me it makes a difference if your characters can say “holy fuck!” while running away from a murderer in a leatherface mask). It takes A LOT of inspiration from classic slasher flicks while retaining the original series’ endearing and occasionally frustrating wackiness (Adam Lambert singing on a Halloween train, anyone?). It is also more queer, more diverse, and more attentive to real-world concerns. But the reason I think this series succeeds where Gossip Girl fails is merely that it has decent writing. When it comes down to it a show just… needs to be written and directed well! It sounds absurd that these thousand plus words are all leading up to the most basic of conclusions, but as long as I keep seeing shows like Gossip Girl failing at fulfilling the most basic of storytelling criteria, it feels necessary to keep drawing those conclusions. If these shows had come out on different networks or at different times, it might be more difficult to apply my gothic double metaphor, but HBO made the creative decision to greenlight both these projects, making the weakness in the first even more apparent.
The final chapter in this story of dark twins may already be written. Gossip Girl has been renewed for a second season that will premiere in the new year. Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin has not yet been renewed and may find itself a victim of HBO/Discovery etc.’s merger-induced culling. It may go down as just a decent short story in the PLL universe, a universe that has surely not produced its last new entry. But I will always remember the way watching Original Sin made me excited to see what our girls would do next and Gossip Girl made me dread slogging through another uneven episode filled with weird and inconsistent character choices, inappropriate relationships that were painted as sexy, and storylines that were sure to trail off into nothingness. Do better HBO.