If you’re anything like us, you’ve been mourning the loss of our beloved Upper East Siders for the past five years. Gossip Girl was a show that captured a huge audience, depicting the intriguingly turbulent and oh-so-scandalous lives of the beautifully rich Serena van der Woodsen and her posse of gossip guys and gals. When the show ended, we were devastated. What would we do without our weekly dose of Upper East Side glamour?!
It looks like all these years later there’s a new show coming to town that may take Gossip Girl’s place as the most binge-worthy socialite show. According to Deadline, HBO has the rights to Prep, a TV adaptation of Curtis Sittenfeld’s popular novel of the same name published in 2005 by Random House. It follows a Midwestern girl, Lee Fiora, as she transfers to Ault Academy, an elite boarding school in New England.
The show is sure to be funny, with former 30 Rock writer and producer Colleen McGuiness stepping in to write and executive produce. Games of Thrones producer Carolyn Strauss will also be an executive producer.
As comical as we expect the show to be, it looks like Prep will also be handling some tough issues. Sexual identity, mental health, drug abuse and racial and sexual discrimination are themes that filled the pages of the book, so it’s likely we’ll be seeing some of the same topics crop up in the TV adaptation.
Sittenfeld’s novel is known for accurately capturing the teen voice, so we can only hope that the show will follow suit. It will be especially interesting to enter this world of elite prep school life from the perspective of an outsider; Lee isn’t from the boarding school circle, so she’s experiencing everything just as we are, without any idea what’s going on, which makes her sound pretty relatable.
Most of the details surrounding the HBO series haven’t been disclosed yet, so there are still a lot of questions about Prep. Can we expect Blair Waldorf-esque characters ruining the social lives of boarding school girls? Gorgeous It girls like Serena on the scene? We can definitely assume that gossip and teenage-centered problems will be on the menu, but beyond that, Prep remains a bit of a mystery. Whether it measures up to the show it’s being compared to or not, it's safe to say that with all this buzz Prep will be drawing in viewers. After this long Gossip Girl drought, we can only hope it’s worth the hype.