‘Gossip Girl’ Showrunner Drew From Arthur Miller and Shakespeare for Season 2

While “Gossip Girl” has always stayed true to the latest pop culture trends — previously drawing from influencers and socialites like Khloe Kardashian — creator and showrunner Joshua Safran dug into the show’s dramatic familial conflicts by taking inspiration from playwrights like Arthur Miller and Shakespeare for season 2.

“It’s all the fun of Elité … with huge, big twists and turns, really sexy sex and really great parties, but it also has these really deep playwright family dynamics like Arthur Miller or Shakespeare,” Safran told TheWrap. “Monet can do the worst things, but her mother’s approval is the thing that’s going to hurt her the most. No matter how big she gets, it comes down to does her mother approve or not.”

As Monet schemes to elevate her status by any means possible — including disrupting tradition by crashing the debutante ball in a turquoise sequin dress — her mother’s disapproving condescension shatters any confidence Monet once had — sparking a balance Safran calls the “secret sauce of ‘Gossip Girl.'”

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This “secret sauce” draws a connective thread from the original “Gossip Girl” and the HBO Max reboot as audiences reckon with Blair’s questionable schemes while remembering her struggles with her eating disorder, her distant relationship with her father and her constant need for her mother’s attention and approval.

“No matter how big Blair got, no matter what she did to Serena or anyone else or herself, you understood it because it was really relatable to being a young person and finding your way in the world,” Safran said.

While “Gossip Girl” fanatics know the ins and outs of the original cast’s drama by heart, Safran explained that the first season of the reboot took a slower approach to introduce the characters — a luxury not afforded to the Upper East Siders when reality comes slamming down at them in Season 2 in a way that might feel “faster and meaner.”

“We started out slow, so you can really get to know these people, so by the time really bad things started happening to them, you actually felt it and you cared,” Safran said. “That’s why I think Season 2 feels … faster and meaner is but I actually think it isn’t. It’s just that now you know them. So when somebody gets hit, they fall hard.”

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As a storyline from the first season drew from the backlash faced by an influencer that prompted her to showcase “her humanity and her willingness to understand that the conversation was happening that was not what she intended,” Safran transported the lesson to Julien, who was forced to go into damage control as her father is accused of sexual assault.

“We would take these little stories, and we would use them as a way to get into the psyche of everybody,” Safran said. “How does that affect your psychology as a teenager?”

Safran looked inwards to his own family as a vignette for Obie, lovingly known as Noble O by Gossip Girl, an activist torn by his conflicting loyalties to various environmental and social justice causes and his family ties to corporate power.

“My brother is a very do-good person and he’s had a very hard time being that and it’s weighed on him all his life,” Safran said. “Obie comes out of that — from somebody who really built has such a strong moral compass that, when the world isn’t moral, they cannot handle it.”

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Similar to the first season, Season 2 stays true to the “Gossip Girl” legacy by re-creating events Safran saw fit for a revival, like the infamous deb ball and the Kiss on the Lips party.

“The rule that we kind of ended up with was if events were rite of passage events, we could have them again,” Safran said, adding that debutante balls happen at a certain age and the Kiss on the Lips party occurs annually and is always thrown by the queen of Constance in her sophomore year. “Those were like, we couldn’t not do this, but are we gonna go to the same gala again? Not if we can help it.”

For Safran, who wrote the original deb ball episode which introduced Sebastian Stan to “Gossip Girl,” revitalizing these Upper East Side traditions is part of the fun of connecting the dots and playing with the franchise’s connective tissue. “There’s great legacies in the ‘Gossip Girl’ world that you just happen to continue,” he concluded.

New episodes of “Gossip Girl” Season 2 drop weekly on Thursdays on HBO Max.