If there is any one plot twist that has been picked apart incessantly, it’s when Dan Humphrey – played by Penn Badgley - was revealed as Gossip Girl. There were think pieces about why it made no sense, essays about plot holes and ultimately, the widespread feeling that this particular character arc wasn’t exactly thought through. And now, we know why: it’s because Dan was never meant to be Gossip Girl at all.
According to a new interview with executive producer Joshua Safran, producers originally decided that Eric van der Woodsen – aka Connor Paolo – was going to be Gossip Girl. In fact, they even planted ‘tiny seeds’ until one fateful day when some viewers ruined it for them.
‘We worked hard to kind of lay in tiny seeds about it being Eric,’ he told BuzzFeed{
And even then Dan wasn’t their first choice, they actually decided Nate – aka Chace Crawford – would be an ideal Gossip Girl. But not because of some deep-seated reason about his past, or because it would actually be quite the surprise, just because he was never filmed sending a tip into the website.
‘One of the writers realized that Nate had never sent a tip in to Gossip Girl, which is true at least through the end of Season 5,’ Safran continued. ‘Nate never sent in a tip in through all of those episodes, which is when we're like ”Oh, well then he's Gossip Girl.”’
Unfortunately, something changed when Safran left Gossip Girl in its penultimate season, and so even he was surprised when producers decided to switch it to Dan. ‘I like to joke that Dan was Gossip Girl because I had left the show by then,' he said. 'But, I understand why Dan was Gossip Girl. I just had my heart set on Nate.’
Ultimately, the biggest takeaway from all of this seems to be that producers had no fucking clue what they were doing when it came to the biggest question viewers had about the show. The fact that there were multiple ideas about who Gossip Girl could be, and that they didn’t even decide until season six, says a lot.
Perhaps - and hopefully - the Gossip Girl reboot will be better thought through...
Read More: All of the Thanksgiving episodes of Gossip Girl, ranked...
Gossip Girl thanksgiving - grazia
1 of 5The Treasure Of Serena Madre
Season Three, Episode 11A Gossip Girl Thanksgiving dinner is always a lightning rod for simmering tensions, unresolved angst and not-so carefully hidden secrets, and in season three, it's the distinctly anodyne affair between Serena and Nate's even beiger cousin Tripp Vanderbilt that gets the most air time: Lily, in a misguided seasonal gesture of goodwill, invites Tripp and his wife Maureen to the van der Woodsen Thanksgiving get-together, where his infidelity is then revealed over the dinner table. Blair, meanwhile, is convinced that her mother is pregnant, while former BFFs Jenny and Eric are feuding again (never have the words 'Your sweet potatoes are bland' been filled with so much venom…). Following the most awkward Gossip Girl episode of all time (yes, we're alluding to the threesome episode with Hilary Duff) Dan is also grappling with the revelation that he might have feelings for Vanessa, whose estranged mother – Gina Torres from Suits! – is in town for the holidays. Gina, in approximately seven years time, you'll be invited to Meghan Markle's wedding, and this sub-par Gossip Girl arc will be but a distant memory…
2 of 5It's Really Complicated
Season Six, Episode EightAt this point in the Gossip Girl timeline, It's Really Complicated serves as both an episode title and a succinct description of just how tangled things have become, plot-wise. Serena and Dan's on-off switch is currently set to 'on,' and the sort-of couple are hosting a Thanksgiving dinner for their nearest and dearest. Sounds lovely, you'd think – before remembering that this is the Upper East Side, where cosy Thanksgiving dinners end in disaster ('Divorces have been filed, affairs have been revealed,' Dan reminisces). Right on cue, Blair conspires to invite Serena's most recent ex, Steven (a nondescript older guy you almost definitely don't remember) along; meanwhile, Chuck manages to convince his former stepmom Lily that his father Bart (who, at this point, is now very much alive after faking his own death) is guilty of financial foul play. The real icing on the cake (should that be crust on the pie?), though, comes when arch-villain Georgina decides to release the 'Serena' chapter from Dan's latest tell-all memoir halfway through the dinner, prompting Nate to act as a viewer surrogate by punching Lonely Boy in the face. Happy Holidays, everyone! Though this final Thanksgiving episode can't quite reach the dizzy heights of the earlier efforts, it remains a respectable entry in the Gossip Girl canon, and a decent end note (there a few things more festive than a punch up, after all).
3 of 5The Magnificent Archibalds
Season Two, Episode 11'For the rest of the country, Thanksgiving is when families come together to give thanks. But on the Upper East Side, the holiday thankfully returns to its roots: lying, manipulation and betrayal.' That Kristen Bell voiceover snippet serves as a mission all Gossip Girl Thanksgiving specials thereafter, but on the show's drama-meter, this episode doesn't register as all that scandalous. Blair's mother has a new boyfriend, the affable Cyrus, but Queen B can only see him as a threat to her Thanksgiving traditions – especially when Dorota reveals that the couple are planning to announce their engagement over dinner. Serena, meanwhile, is dating Cyrus's terrible son Aaron, a Brooklyn art hipster whose aesthetic is best described as 'prototype member of Mumford & Sons.' He's one of those guys who aren't really into monogamy, like, as a concept, so it's a major moment when he deigns to tell Serena that he's ready for them to become exclusive. Instead of reacting to the numerous warning signs (the fact that she has to lie to him in order for him to like her, his dubious smattering of facial hair, I could go on) like a normal human, S sees this as something to celebrate. Across town, Nate's father (or 'The Captain,' as certain characters insist on calling him, despite the fact that he seems to possess neither a boat nor a career in the navy) has returned from hiding and finally hands himself over to the authorities for embezzlement. Way to go, dad! Oh, and in a hint of what's to come, the van der Woodsens learn that their stepfather Bart Bass has an extensive dossier of information about their messy pasts locked away in a safe. Due diligence and all that, we guess.
4 of 5Gaslit
Season Four, Episode 10Ah, season four – that tipping point when the writers decided to totally forgo any cursory attempts at realism and instead allowed the scandalous lives of Manhattan's elite to spiral into immaculately dressed melodrama. That means that in Gaslit, there's very little giving of thanks or eating of pumpkin pie, because Serena has been drugged by the unholy trinity of Juliet, Jenny Humphrey and Vanessa (who, to cement her villainy, bangs on about how great her 'tofu sage stuffing recipe' is at the start of the episode). In their latest attempt to bring down the Upper East Side's golden girl, they're trying to convince S's family and friends that she's spiraling out of control. In a series first, Dan is the only one to realise that something is amiss, and Serena is sent to the Ostroff Centre (the rehab from season one). Little J re-develops a conscience and reveals her role in the scheme to Rufus, who, in a remarkable display of festive spirit, decides the best course of action is to banish his only daughter from New York, advising her to stay with her mother in Hudson for the foreseeable. It's what the Pilgrim Fathers would have wanted!
5 of 5Blair Waldorf Must Pie
Season One, Episode NineWhen it comes to Gossip Girl Thanksgiving episodes, the original is always the best. Blair Waldorf Must Pie (a play on John Tucker Must Die, which, incidentally, starred Lonely Boy himself, Penn Badgley) gives us fuzzy flashbacks to the previous year's Thanksgiving, with snapshots of Serena's party girl days and Blair's bulimia, but the present is anything but drama free – and the parents are, in the main, the ones wreaking emotional havoc. Blair is upset with her father's holiday no-show, which triggers her disordered eating, while Nate is grappling with the revelation that the dad he hero-worships has been embezzling money; later in the episode, he's hospitalised after an overdose. The prize for the most awkward Thanksgiving dinner of the whole show, though, has to go to the Humphreys' sit-down with the van der Woodsens in Rufus's Brooklyn loft. Dan and Jenny's mother is in town, after an unexplained absence, and her animosity towards Lily van der Woodsen is making the dinner table atmosphere distinctly frosty. It soon comes out, as such things tend to do, that Rufus and Lily have romantic history – and that they kissed at Eleanor Waldorf's party the previous week. Naturally, Serena and Dan are pretty appalled that their parents used to be a thing: cue a frantic discussion between Eric and Jenny about whether they might actually be related. It's a level of awkward that even Rufus's many, many plates of waffles can't salvage. The younger generation head out to a diner for a makeshift Thanksgiving, joined by Blair and, later, Lily, putting all the drama to one side to eat fries and play happy families for the rest of the day. It's the lowest key van der Woodsen Thanksgiving we'll see – and it's probably the one we'd most like to attend ourselves.