Gossip Girl revival creator says show is almost certainly too expensive to find a new home
Josh Safran apparently had to chop some last-minute cliffhangers out of his HBO Max series after it was abruptly canceled
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Say what you like about HBO Max’s (now former) revival of Gossip Girl: It didn’t flinch away from putting its budget up on the screen. From the opulent homes of its young Manhattan socialites, to their opulent fashions, to their opulent lifestyles, the show was dedicated to embodying a high-society world that was, in a word…expensive.
Which has now become a fairly serious problem, as the show—recently canceled at the cancel-happy streaming service—was reportedly looking around for a new network that might be willing to foot the bill for its pricey tastes. This is per a post-mortem interview with series creation Josh Safran, who talked with Vanity Fair this week about the apparent impossibilites facing a possible revival of the revival.
“It takes a lot of money to look this good,” Safran notes in the interview, pointing out that the only way for the show to really break even would be if it was pulling in event TV numbers like House Of The Dragon, or recent hit premiere The Last Of Us. (Although he also remarks, “Who even knows what anyone’s numbers are?” which is one of those abiding giant question marks of the streaming era.)
As to actually finding a new home, Safran’s not optimistic:
I don’t think we will end up anywhere. We are, again, so expensive. I am so grateful for having been given that. We were able to throw events with many extras in the biggest locations in New York that I feel none of us who work on the show—actors, crew—can believe we were even allowed to do. And that costs a lot of money. But, it’s all on the screen—I think this show is as gorgeous as any show on television. I just don’t believe that we will end up somewhere else because everybody is cost cutting.
Safran says his hope had been to get the show to a fourth season, with each covering a single semester of life at Constance Billard. (And notes that he and his writers had already done a mini-writers’ room to sketch out more specific plans for the third season.) He also says HBO Max actually asked him to include extra cliffhangers to the end of the show’s second, and now final, season, before they switched directions and canceled the series; that being said, the streamer was gracious enough to allow him to “go back in and amend some of the stuff in the finale at the end. It doesn’t all get tied up, but the story engine for season three was launched at the end of season two, and I removed that.”
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It kind of makes sense that a streaming-only show with a somewhat limited audience, both in terms of demographics and time because like the old or original show, it will hold up less and less over time, should have a lower budget than something that ran on broadcast television before the proliferation of channels or at most, equally as low as something that ran between infomercials on the CW.I binged Euphoria to see Zendaya’s award-winning performance, but I’m not really either show’s demographic. I guess kudos to the showrunners for being unwilling to compromise and for standing their ground, but too bad for any fans.
Don’t forget how the lack of syndication.TV was never designed to make money the first go around.This streaming model just isn’t sustainable without the ability to sell content to someone else.
You might call me old — I wasn’t the demographic for the first run, either — but I watched the first few seasons because it was something you could stream. I may have watched it via Hulu, but looking at the list of CW shows by year on Wikipedia, I think I probably streamed Gossip Girl via the CW site (after sampling based on Kristen Bell) and because there wasn’t much there, I found Reaper, then a couple of years later, I stopped watching GG because there was more to stream.I’ve been trying to stream TV since before the Hulu beta. I’m not going back to TV.
You must be lacking sympathies for Capitalism, then.
I honestly have never understood why every single media company decided that the best course of action was to launch a streaming service of their own. Like how did none of them just think, “hey, we could start a bidding war for whatever content we have that people like and make a ton of money without doing anything”? NBC is a great example of this – they basically launched an entire service around The Office (a show they actually had to pay $100m / year to get the streaming rights for despite producing it themselves) and they’re losing billions (repeat: billions) a year on that service right now. That’s a better route than collecting $80-100m (or more) in profit on The Office every year and then even more on top for other shows they have?
Waiiittt..Are you accounting for Universal+®, as well?
How do you make a Gossip Girl show super expensive?I mean I guess I get how – easy to spend money. But why? Who was this show even for?
Designer brands and rental of real new York rich people venues get expensive!
Filming in New York isn’t cheap especially in the rich parts of the city which is where the show mainly takes place. Prices have gone up since the pandemic
This just seems nuts. No one could ever have seriously thought a revival of Gossip Girl was going to have the kids of audience that House of the Dragon has, and there was no reason for it to be so expensive. It’s not a show that requires significant special effects or enormous sets. It didn’t have an especially famous cast. And while I can understand it splurging on costumes (since having recognizable, pricey designers is part of the show’s vibe) clothes just aren’t that expensive when you’re talking about the scale of a TV show.Did they just shoehorn in a scene every episode that was like, “Well, the scene where character A finds out about character B’s betrayal will be at the Met Ball, so we need the actual Met and 1,000 extras all wearing gowns?”
Did they just shoehorn in a scene every episode that was like, “Well, the scene where character A finds out about character B’s betrayal will be at the Met Ball, so we need the actual Met and 1,000 extras all wearing gowns?”Pretty much.
I’d reckon that you not just missed the incremental-costs of production and that too, in a season consciously making a creative-decision to move its…..Production across continents & 2 water-bodies( even if that comes with the tax-credits “bribes” for the production)…..They can only do so much when the perennially-rudimentary thing you’re missing: You always have to have the hip music( lest you be confused by ‘pop[-/ ]music’).For instance, I’m currently at the first season’s finale and I’ve lost count of how many trendy songs on streamers they’ve synced and cast-sangalong for the finale, a-lone.And you do realise that how elaborately complex=cost-prohibitive the oligopolist mainstream music industry is, no? Add that with all-media l( i.e. including medium which might not have even been conceived yet) distribution rights in-perpetuity. You see how the multilayered sync+performance rights have suddenly skyrocketed the balloon — especially if it’s in a jurisdiction where either there’s no bribery “tax-incentives” for post-production, or you can only have either the production, or post-production tax-rebates bribes: Not both, à la “having a cake, and eating it too”.Even if you’re being a stereotypical “AV® Club” commenter, understand this: I am not.And I can see explain with very-sensical pointers that how this show with essentially non-existent original-score album volume unlike a regular TV production not supposed to be a musical, they ended-up skyrocketing the overall production-budget as much as they possibly could — rather than hiring a talented music-composer, and exploit/torture them for composing the score for as little pay as they can make them the overall production-budget as much as they possibly could to, with their paw being atop their chest with them in a standing-pos[tur]e.
It just feels now that, in the face of a coming recession from the shadow of the post-pandemic, the opulent low stakes drama of rich teen influencers seems pretty…meh! I also can’t unsee that 2 of the male leads look comically older than their characters should be.
Story engine?
A sincere query?