Gossip Girl creator, Josh Safran practically grew up on a real life set of the show.
In a new interview with Refinery29, Safran reveals that growing up on the Upper East Side of New York was never really a walk in the park for him.
While Safran may have grown up being surrounded by excess, he wasn’t Chuck Bass loaded, but he also didn’t have the dwindling finances of Dan Humphrey. He was somewhere in between.
Safran said, “I didn’t have all the money that other kids did. I would take the subway while they were taking BMWs.”
“I grew up on the Upper East Side at a time where being gay was not something you were on the Upper East Side so I always felt a little removed, sort of outside watching.”
Whether it was his formative years that sparked his interest in the complexity of “rich people problems”, the aforementioned problems have seen him forge a career in TV exploring all of that and more.
Safran said, “My whole career, I’ve been drawn to that because I find it so fascinating. We always want to know how that one percent lives.”
While Safran has worked on both the original Gossip Girl series and the current one, there’s a very obvious shift in the dialogue and the subject matter of both the characters and the story line.
And that was a conscious choice, to be more accurately representative of Gen Z. But at the same time, Gossip Girl’s formula will always stay the course: watching the elite go down.
“We like seeing how everybody fucks up,” Safran said.
“In a world that we live in right now — where these rich people are not getting their comeuppance [and are] launching themselves into space and saying thank you to the workers whose lives are being destroyed by them — we want to then somehow have an outlet for our outrage and anger. We want to see them go down. TV shows like this give us that ability to watch that happen. It’s schadenfreude.”
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