‘Gossip Girl’ Episode 2 Recap: (Fund)Raising Hell

Spotted: Gossip Girl changing the parameters of its own show. According to the traditional Kristen Bell voiceover narration that opens each episode, GGv2.0 is now about “the scandalous lives of New York’s elite,” rather than the previous iteration’s focus on Manhattan specifically. Congratulations to Brooklyn, I guess? And maybe Queens, depending on the neighborhood?

Gentrification aside, the second episode of the new Gossip Girl (“She’s Having a Maybe”) delivers, well, what you’d expect an episode of Gossip Girl to deliver. Money is spent in large quantities, rich people behave badly, people who really shouldn’t make out with each other make out with each other, feuds rise and fall and rise again and fall again. Moving fast was always the original GG‘s strong suit, and the new model seems to be following along.

The central plotline continues to revolve around Julien Calloway and her half-sister Zoya Lott. As the episode begins, Julien is stalling for time, trying to front as if she and her now ex-boyfriend Obie are still an item in order to save face with her rabid followers. But all Obie cares about is his newfound interest in Zoya, the spontaneity of which is a far cry from the thoroughly, drearily staged relationship he had with Julien.

Much of the rest of the episode is a sort of cat and mouse game, with Julien striving to put her own spin on events even as Obie drifts into Zoya’s orbit and the new Gossip Girl encourages the new couple. But the teachers who run the GG account, led by mousey Kate Keller, have been stymied in their attempt to make the new Gossip Girl a legit thing. When they post a picture of Zoya and Obie together that some rando sent them, Julien counters by recycling an old photo of her and Obie together, made to look like it was taken that same night. It’s enough to get Gossip Girl’s entire account flagged for misinformation and bombarded with DMs calling GG a liar. 

This leaves the Gossip Girl collective in the lurch, at least until they uncover some new dirt: Zoya was apparently kicked out of her old school, for reasons unknown, rather than simply transferring out. Kate digs up the details, knowing that publishing them would put Gossip Girl back on the map. But she winds up striking a deal with a repentant Julien instead, arranging a truce in exchange for Julien convincing Instagram to verify the GG account. It’s all frightfully 2021. 

At any rate, the main event of the episode is a fundraiser in which the preposterously wealthy parents of Constance Billard and St. Jude’s—fresh from parent-teacher conferences that serve primarily as a review of the teachers rather than the students—raise money for school supplies for the underprivileged. (You know—the people that the ultra-rich become ultra-rich by milking them for all they’re worth.) This is a big deal for everyone on the show, a see-and-be-seen situation with all kinds of ramifications. Monet and Luna want to use it to destroy Julien’s rival Zoya utterly. Their friend Audrey just wants her mother (Laura Benanti) to sober up long enough to make an appearance, something she failed to do at the conferences. Zoya and Julien mostly want their fathers (Luke Kirby and Jonathan Fernandez respectively), who hate each other with the fire of a thousand suns, to stay far apart.

Then there’s Max, the enfant terrible Chuck Bass type of the group. He spends the episode courting—sure, courting, let’s go with that instead of stalking—his school’s classics teacher, Mr. Caparros (Jason Gotay). At a bathhouse Caparros is known to frequent, Max stages a kiss with Aki, whom he convinced to come along (to be fair, it doesn’t seem to have taken a ton of convincing) in an attempt to make the older man jealous (or horny).

At the fundraiser, Max pursues his quarry further. In all cases, Caparros tells Max “I don’t fuck my students,” though he does whisper a sweet nothing into Max’s ear when the student inquires about what might happen between them after graduation. This is the kind of overtly creepy, deliciously sleazy stuff the original Gossip Girl could only hint at. (There’s also a bunch of male abs and ass on display, also something the original series couldn’t or wouldn’t do.)

And the night doesn’t end there for Max. The next morning, Audrey learns from her hungover mother that her company is filing for bankruptcy, hence her bad behavior while drunk at the party the previous night. But then Audrey retreats to her own bedroom, and wouldn’t you know it, Max has spent the night, as the two secretly worked out their frustrations in bed together. No one, of course, can ever know this; everyone, of course, eventually will.

In the end, Zoya and Julien have a rapprochement of sorts. After a disastrous shopping-spree “date” with Obie in which the pair buy those underprivileged kids their school supplies directly, only to be interrupted by Julien and her posse and their dads and Gossip Girl all in one go, Zoya’s on the verge of withdrawing from Constance Billard entirely. But Julien heads her off at the pass, promising an end of hostilities and a newly forged relationship as sisters. 

That’s the thing about this iteration of Gossip Girl: The two main characters, Zoya and Julien, really don’t want to fight, at least not yet. The rivalry that the Gossip Girl account has tried to stir up is failing to materialize. Will that change? I’d bet real American dollars that it will. That’s the thing about Gossip Girl, then and now: Drama reigns supreme.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Watch Gossip Girl Episode 2 ("She's Having A Maybe") on HBO Max