Gossip Girl reboot is HBO Max’s most-watched original series launch

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

It looks like viewers missed teenage debauchery from the Upper Eastsiders. The Gossip Girl reboot launched on HBO Max on July 8 and the streamer, along with Samba TV, is reporting that the new show HBO Max's most-watched original series over the first weekend of availability.

HBO Max states that Gossip Girl saw record viewership over its first four days on the streamer. The first episode premiered to 555,000 U.S. households, according to Samba TV. The other stats that HBO Max will care about since Gossip Girl skews a bit younger, is that the show dominated on Twitter during its premiere and trended No.1. The series stayed in the top five trends through mid-day and on TikTok, the series gained around 15 billion impressions of content that was inspired by the show. The point is to build hype and buzz and Gossip Girl has done that with the target audience.

The new Gossip Girl is written by showrunner Joshua Safran and is based on the book by Cecily von Ziegesar, which also inspired the original series. On the reboot, eight years have gone by since the original Gossip Girl website went dark and a new generation of New York private school teens is introduced to the social surveillance of Gossip Girl. The new version of the show allows the creators to address how much social media and the landscape of New York itself have changed in the intervening years. The series stars Jordan Alexander, Thomas Doherty, Tavi Gevinson, Emily Alyn Lind, Evan Mock, Zion Moreno, Whitney Peak, Savannah Lee Smith, Todd Almond, Adam Chanler-Berat, Johnathan Fernandez, and Jason Gotay, while Kristen Bell returns as the voice of Gossip Girl.

On Rotten Tomatoes, the rebooted Gossip Girl wasn't embraced by critics, receiving a 36% rotten score on Rotten Tomatoes but the fresh audience score of 81% indicates that casual viewers and fans enjoyed what they saw. HBO Max was looking for a headline-grabbing series and Gossip Girl is proving to be just that for the streamer so far.

Did YOU watch Gossip Girl over the weekend? The upcoming 5 episodes of Part One will drop weekly on HBO Max Thursday and Part Two's six episodes will premiere in the fall.