Even Gossip Woman season 2’s sex-filled plots can’t prime Riverdale

On HBO Max’s Gossip Girl reboot/sequel, it’s laborious to be in a throuple. There’s some lore right here: One of many notorious moments from the unique CW model of the present was an impromptu threesome between common forged members Dan Humphrey (Penn Badgley) and Vanessa Abrams (Jessica Szohr) and recurring visitor star Olivia (Hilary Duff), all set to a hilarious cowl of T.I.’s “No matter You Like.”

The brand new Gossip Woman, free of the printed requirements of community tv, begins its new season (and ended its first) with a threesome. The present isn’t taken with being simply lewder, however deeper: Buddies turned lovers Aki (Evan Mock), Max Wolfe (Thomas Doherty), and Audrey (Emily Alyn Lind) spend the primary few episodes of season 2 hooking up and making an attempt to determine methods to make their throuple work as a bona fide relationship. Naturally, they’re dangerous at it, which makes for excellent hijinks — a phrase that might’ve been laborious to use to the primary season of Gossip Woman.

The world has modified across the storied teen drama franchise. The HBO Max collection, a few new technology of elite college students attending the identical Higher East Aspect highschool the unique present was set in, has labored valiantly to acknowledge this. Gen Z teenagers can’t flaunt wealth the identical approach their millennial predecessors did; it’s far too gauche. So that they gown up their energy jockeying and petty rivalries with lip service to structural inequality and local weather activism, and it’s largely nice, despite the fact that the actual draw is the throuple hijinks.

Photograph: Barbara Nitke/HBO Max

Sadly, even that won’t be sufficient. It is a Riverdale world now, child, and it’s laborious for a teen drama that when traded in outrageous antics to maintain up when Riverdale is on the market… doing Midsommar on a weekly basis. The Overton Window of Teen Troublemaking has shifted fully. The Gossip Woman writers need to do a throuple story? How charming. Veronica Lodge ran a speakeasy/on line casino in a diner basement whereas all of her mates have been trapped in a murderous sport of Dungeons & Dragons.

Gossip Woman isn’t dangerous. In reality, season 2 brings a established order reshuffle the present desperately wanted, because the artificial-feeling rivalry between Queen Bee influencer JC (Jordan Alexander) and her long-lost, working-class sister Zoya (Whitney Peak) that drove season 1 provides technique to one thing a lot extra enjoyable: Particularly, JC’s former sidekick Monet (Savannah Lee Smith) is uninterested in taking part in second fiddle, and tries more and more determined methods of orchestrating a feud with the hilariously disinterested JC. And in an fascinating twist, the identification of Gossip Woman, the nameless poster who dishes on the prep college college students’ huge secrets and techniques, is up for grabs.

Whether or not Gossip Woman’s second season change-up is sufficient for you largely is determined by what you anticipate from a contemporary teen drama. Riverdale started an arms race — one which it couldn’t even sustain with, given how exhausting it could possibly be to look at religiously — however arguably primed the pump for a show like Euphoria, which fits forward and exhibits the intercourse and medicines different scandal-fueled teen exhibits might solely discuss. Maybe Gossip Woman’s playful voice (nonetheless Kristen Bell’s similar to within the unique present) might convey the teenager drama again all the way down to Earth — or discover a new regular someplace in its throupled mania.

The primary two episodes of Gossip Woman season 2 are actually streaming on HBO Max, with new episodes premiering weekly on Thursdays.