It has never made sense to me that Dan was Gossip Girl. Dan didn’t have a backbone, nor was he in with everything enough to know all the things he did. Sure, I know that there was a lot of tips and all that.
But Dan just wasn’t good enough at keeping secrets in order to be Gossip Girl. He also was a conniving self indulgent fake, so that part I can see. Like, I never loved Dan Humphries, because he just seemed like a chameleon, but a bad one at that.
Joshua Safran, the showrunner and creator of the HBO Max revival series, which debuts this week, opened up about who was supposed to be Gossip Girl. And hey, it wasn’t supposed to be Dan (at least it wasn’t up until the time that Josh left).
“I think there would have been holes in anybody being Gossip Girl, and it wasn’t Dan when I left the show [after Season 5], but I also understand why it is Dan. Yes, I agree there are things that don’t line up, but it had to be Dan,” he said when speaking to the The Daily Beast. “I wanted it to be Nate, and it actually makes much more sense when it’s Nate—even when it doesn’t make sense. I mean, it would have been great to never reveal it.”
I agree with him though. It would have been more interesting if we didn’t know and if it was always left up to us guessing.
Sure, I would have been pissed, but I have to admit, that I see the greatness that move would have been now.
He continued by saying, ”It was Nate. It was Nate until the day I left. I think we all came to the conclusion that it might be Nate by the end of Season 4, and then we spent Season 5 teeing it up. If you watch it, there are many clues to it being Nate. But I also think weirdly, in noir fashion, it’s great that we dropped a red herring. But it wasn’t as organic as Dan. With Dan, it makes sense because he wanted to find a way in; but with Nate, it was because he’d never sent anything in to Gossip Girl, and if it had been Nate, it was based on this idea that he’d felt so guilty for sleeping with Serena that he had to create an alter ego to bring us all to it.”
Read the entire interview with Joshua HERE and be sure to watch Gossip Girl when it starts streaming July 8th.
