Kristen Bell Returning as ‘Gossip Girl’ Narrator

The Good Place star Kristen Bell is returning to the Gossip Girl world for the HBO Max reboot of the popular CW series. Bell will once again serve as the show’s narrator, just as she did during the original run. The new Gossip Girl is described as “continuation” of the original series.

“Kristen Bell has always been and will always be the voice of Gossip Girl,” Gossisp Girl creators Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage said in a joint statement to TVLine Thursday.

The new series will be written by former Gossip Girl executive producer Joshua Safran, with Schwartz and Savage both returning as executive producers as well.

Back in July, WarnerMedia’s HBO Max ordered a 10-episode series featuring a new group of Manhattan private school students. The new series will explore “just how much social media — and the landscape of New York itself — has changed in the intervening years” since the original series ended.

Schwartz later told reporters at the Television Critics Association Press Tour in July that the new series is not a traditional remake. He described it as a “continuation” of the world in which Serena and Blair lived. He also left the door open for Blake Lively or Leighton Meester to come back if they are not too busy.

“We’ve reached out to all of them to let them know it was happening, and we would love for them to be involved if they want to be involved,” Schwartz said at the time. “But [we] certainly didn’t want to make it contingent upon their [participation]. They played those characters for six years, and if they felt like they were good with that, we wanted to respect that. But obviously, it would be great to see them again.”

HBO Max is set to launch in May 2020, but it is not clear when Gossip Girl 2.0 will debut.

The original Gossip Girl series was based on the Cecil vin Ziegesar novels and starred Lively as Serena van der Woodsen and Meester as Blair Waldorf. It ran six seasons and 121 episodes between 2007 and 2012.

HBO Max will cost $14.99 a month and will be available to HBO subscribes through AT&T and DirecTV, as well as HBO Now subscribers. An ad-supported version is expected to be available in 2021. Aside from the new Gossip Girl series, other HBO Max originals include an Adventure Time revival and Kaley Cuoco’s The Flight Attendant. Classic shows in the Warner library, including Friends, Pretty Little Liars, The Big Bang Theory and many others will also be available to stream. New CW shows will also be carried.