Love it or hate it (though indifference to it is always a possibility), Gossip Girl is back.

HBO Max has rebooted Gossip Girl, a series that originally aired on The CW from 2007-2012. Back before The CW became synonymous with DC superhero shows, the network tried a strategy of creating shows exclusively for women 18-34, aka the demographic least likely to watch network television. The original series, based on a young adult book series by Cecily von Ziegesar, was set at a tony private school in Manhattan’s Upper East Side and revolved around the rivalries and romances in a group of privileged students.

That series helped launched the careers of Blake Lively, Leighton Meester, and Penn Badgley, but otherwise was just a minor moment of TV history. Nevertheless, HBO Max picked up the property and has continued on from the previous series. Gossip Girl 2021 was developed by original series’ executive producer Joshua Safran, executive produced by original series’ co-creators Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage. Safran also serves as showrunner.

The first episode of the series – there will be 12 episodes in season one, delivered weekly – debuted on Thursday. Here is what you need to consider if you are deciding whether to take the plunge into this new iteration of Gossip Girl.

The new show is set in the same world as the first one.
The crop of students currently enrolled at the Constance Billard School are new to us, but they are the next generation of students following in the footsteps of Serena van der Woodsen, Blair Waldorf and Chuck Bass. The new crop of kids are vaguely aware of these legends, but the teachers are the ones name-dropping the OGs here. In another nod to the continuity between the two version, Kristen Bell returns to give a voice to the ubiquitous social media snitch Gossip Girl, though as before that is mainly for the benefit of the audience.

The new show is more inclusive
The original series was, in a word, white. There’s no way around it; Serena, Blair, Chuck, Nate, Jenny and Dan, the main characters, were all caucasian. Vanessa was the only major character who was a person of color. The new show corrects this error by having a cast that looks fairly diverse – at least for the female characters. (The male cast still looks pretty pale). Does that make a better story? Not yet. Although the two main characters are Black, the show stops short of examining what that means for them over the first few episodes. An exploration of racism in private schools sounds pretty powerful, but that’s not what this show is about. Gossip Girl 2021 also features more sexualities; some main characters are gay or bisexual and sexual fluidity is accepted – though again, it’s not enough to just have characters that are LGBTQ; they have to be fully fleshed-out people.

But like its predecessor, the new show is still about the 1%
Unlike the first version, which had the wrong-side-of-the-tracks (but still better off than most people in the city) Humphrey clan as contrast to the super-wealthy student body, this show barely acknowledges the unaffluent. Sure, new girl Zola takes the bus to school and needs her scholarship to attend, but she has a sister who buys her expensive kit and gets her into exclusive events. A couple students seem to have a working social conscience, but for most their privilege is just a fact of life, like having a Instagram account.

The new show isn’t just about the students
The teachers are main characters, and are the ones who instigate the revival of Gossip Girl in an effort to teach a lesson to their arrogant students. Upset by the way the Constance Billard students get away with grade hacking and general disrespect of authority, instructor Kate Keller, played by Tavi Gevinson, comes across the Gossip Girl site, saying it’s like “a lost Edith Wharton novel.” Hyperbole aside, Keller persuades a few co-workers to revive Gossip Girl as a watchdog to provoke better behavior. They start on Twitter but get no attention there (in one teacher’s words, it’s “a glorified chat room for meme sharing, conspiracy theorists, and Lin-Manuel Miranda”), then realize they need to move the account to Instagram where the judicious use of tagging brings the salacious gossip to the attention to the school’s elites where it can achieve maximum damage.

The homoerotic subtext is now straight-up text
In the original series, it was pretty much understood that Chuck Bass would sleep with anyone, but he was only explicitly bisexual in the books. However, he did always seem to have more than a passing interest in his best friend Nate. In the new series, Max is an out pansexual and encourages bi-curious Aki and his girlfriend Audrey’s sexual fascination with him.

Being on HBO Max allows the show to be more adult
F-bombs and drugs are dropped equally casually, and there is plenty of simulated sex. In the first episode there was no nudity, but it’s probably not off the table. It’s not realistic to expect that the horny, unsupervised and hedonistic teens in this world are not going to spend a lot of time having sex, so while whether this morally good is debatable, at least it comports with reality.

Gossip Girl is now so 2021
And that means that everything these teens do is for the purposes of Instagram followers. No experience, no event, no emotion exists in their lives except for the express purposes of exploiting it for the ‘gram. Will their relentless grind of documenting everything for their ‘stories’ resonate with the demographic that the show is supposedly aimed at? Probably not – remember that the original GG didn’t really have a huge Nielsen following among women 18-34. To older viewers (yours truly in particular) the pursuit of Instagram fame just seems exceptionally tedious.

At least one plot twist was a welcome surprise
One big surprise this show had to offer was the relationship between half-sisters Julien and Zoya. They share a mother, who passed away, and the girls were separated by the bad blood between each of their fathers. Zoya scholarships her way into Constance Billard, and while it looks like the two are being set up to be bitter rivals, it turns out that they are very close, though they must hide their relationship from their fathers. Their closeness is very touching, though it is quickly torched when the two become the first targets of Gossip Girl.

The characters – and actors that portray them – don’t really stand out
Yet. It’s easy to look back at the previous iteration of Gossip Girl and see in hindsight how the original cast, in particular golden girl Serena and her portrayer Lively, were destined to be memorable, and its unfair to judge the new show based on one episode of failing to do the same. But so far, only Julien (Jordan Alexander) and Zoya (Whitney Peak) were given any depth and their portrayers a chance to shine. The rest of the cast – most of which aren’t very well-known – kind of blend into the background. The most recognizable cast member, Emily Alyn Lind as Audrey, appeared in both Babysitter movies on Netflix, and has a large body of previous work. But beyond that, two of the girls have nothing to do in the show (yet) aside from facilitating Julien’s grasp at fame, and some of the others just seem to hang about taking drugs to combat ennui. They all need more to do.

Gossip Girl 2021 is fine. It has handsome sets, beautiful costumes, and it has a soundtrack that, like the show’s previous incarnation, features some bangers. But the show needs more – more depth, more substance, more dimension. Otherwise, it can only have the fleeting and hollow resonance of the Instagram posts its characters devote their lives to creating.