Shows Like Gossip Girl (Both Versions) to Watch Next

There are two ways to miss Gossip Girl, and they are not the same illness.

Some of us miss the machinery: an anonymous account with too much information, a school where everyone's parents know each other's lawyers, a scandal that mutates by lunchtime. Others miss a specific texture of 2007 — flip phones, headbands, a soundtrack that sounds like a very expensive indie playlist, Blair Waldorf ruining someone's life over a seating chart.

So this list is sorted by symptom rather than by rating. Below: shows like Gossip Girl for the scandal addicts, for the people who want the original's exact 2000s frequency back, and for anyone who came in through the 2021 version and now has nowhere to put that energy.

The one rule I applied: the show has to be about what people do to each other socially. Not zombies. Not aliens. Social damage only.

If You Love the Scandal — Elite Drama Picks

You're not here for teen romance. You're here for the moment someone realizes their secret is already circulating. Every pick in this section is a scandal drama first and everything else second.

Elite (2018 · Netflix)

Three working-class teenagers get scholarships to Las Encinas, Spain's most expensive private school, after their old building collapses. Within a season, one student is dead, and the show cuts between the party where it happened and the police interviews afterwards. It's the purest elite prep school drama available: the rich kids close ranks, the scholarship kids get blamed by default, and everyone is sleeping with the person they should least be sleeping with.

Watch it if: you wanted Gossip Girl with actual criminal consequences.

One of Us Is Lying (2021 · Peacock)

Five students walk into detention. One of them runs a gossip app that publishes everyone's secrets. He dies in that room, and the surviving four — jock, princess, brain, criminal, arranged exactly like that on purpose — each had a reason to want it. The anonymous-poster premise is essentially Gossip Girl reworked as a murder mystery, which makes it the most literal answer to "series similar to Gossip Girl" on this entire list.

Watch it if: you always suspected Gossip Girl was one bad night away from a homicide investigation.

Cruel Summer (2021 · Hulu)

Kate Wallis, the popular girl, disappears. Jeanette Turner, the awkward one, takes over her friends, her boyfriend, and her whole social position — and is later accused of having seen Kate in captivity and said nothing. Each episode runs the same date across three years: 1993, 1994, 1995. You watch two girls swap places and never get a straight answer about who is lying until very late.

Watch it if: you like being made to change your mind about a character four separate times.

The Politician (2019 · Netflix)

Payton Hobart, adopted into a Santa Barbara fortune, wants to be President and has decided that student body president at his private high school is step one. His campaign runs like a real one: polling, focus groups, opposition research, a running mate selected for demographic value. Ryan Murphy made it, so it's overdressed and extremely arch, and Jessica Lange turns up to steal a whole arc.

Watch it if: your favorite Gossip Girl scenes were the strategic ones.

Tell Me Lies (2022 · Hulu)

Lucy arrives at Baird College and meets Stephen, who is charming, older, and methodically destructive. The show tracks their relationship across eight years while flashing forward to a wedding where everyone involved clearly hates each other, and there's a death in the first year that nobody discusses honestly. It's the grown-up entry here — less teen drama, more autopsy of a relationship you can see going wrong from space.

Watch it if: you're 27 and Gossip Girl now reads as a documentary about red flags.

If You Miss the Original 2000s Vibe

This section is for the specific feeling of a 2000s teen drama: money, coastline, a needle-drop over a slow-motion walk, an outsider dropped into a closed world.

The O.C. (2003 · streaming varies by region)

Ryan Atwood, a kid from Chino with an arrest record, gets taken in by his public defender's family in Newport Beach and immediately becomes the wealthiest zip code's problem. Same creator as Gossip Girl — Josh Schwartz — and you can feel it: the mansions, the class friction, the music budget, the adults who are messier than the teenagers. Seth Cohen invented an entire personality type that is still walking around.

Watch it if: you want the original blueprint, sunnier and with more sarcasm.

Veronica Mars (2004 · Hulu)

Neptune, California has billionaires and the people who clean for them, and nothing else. Veronica used to belong to the first group until her father lost his job as sheriff and her best friend was murdered. Now she's a teenage private investigator working out of her dad's agency, solving a case a week while chipping at the big one. Sharper writing than almost anything else here.

Watch it if: you liked the class warfare more than the couture.

Skins (2007 · Netflix in select regions)

Bristol teenagers, no money, no supervision, no Upper East Side. Each pair of seasons follows a completely new cast, and each episode hands the point of view to a different character, so you keep learning that the person you'd written off has a much worse home life than you assumed. It's the British corrective to the American fantasy — same chaos, none of the penthouses.

Watch it if: you want the emotional damage without the styling budget.

One Tree Hill (2003 · Max)

Two half-brothers in a small North Carolina town share a father, a basketball team, and a rapidly escalating grudge. It runs nine seasons, ages its cast into adulthood, and gets progressively unhinged in ways I refuse to spoil. The relevant part: it's built on the same engine of rumor, rivalry, and public humiliation, just relocated to a town where everyone already knew everyone at birth.

Watch it if: you want a long one. Very long.

And for the original itself, streaming rights have moved around more than once — the details of one of those moves are in Gossip Girl Returning to Netflix in July 2023, But There's a Catch.

If You Watched the 2021 Reboot — What's Next

The Gossip Girl reboot 2021 ran two seasons on HBO Max before it was cancelled: Julien Calloway's Constance Billard, teachers running the account instead of a mystery blogger, better clothes, and a cast far more comfortable with being messy on purpose. If that was your entry point, you want glossier, queerer, more modern. Here:

Euphoria (2019 · Max)

Rue, seventeen and out of rehab on day one, narrates a school year in a California town where everyone is falling apart in high definition. Each episode opens with a character's backstory told like a case file, and the visual style — glitter, neon, a camera that swings around a house party — is the reason half of TikTok looks the way it does. Heavier than Gossip Girl by an order of magnitude.

Watch it if: you loved the reboot's look and can handle a much darker script.

Young Royals (2021 · Netflix)

Prince Wilhelm of Sweden gets shipped off to Hillerska, an old boarding school for the aristocracy, after a nightclub video embarrasses the palace. He falls for Simon, a scholarship student, and then a recording of them leaks. Three seasons, a proper ending, and the best version anywhere of the thing Gossip Girl kept reaching for: what surveillance does to a teenager who was born public.

Watch it if: you want an elite prep school drama that actually finishes its story.

Maxton Hall — The World Between Us (2024 · Prime Video)

Ruby Bell attends a British private school on scholarship, keeps her head down, and wants Oxford. Then she witnesses something involving the Beaufort family — old money, textile empire — and James Beaufort is dispatched to buy her silence. It's a German production of an enormously popular romance novel, and it hits the Chuck-and-Blair frequency with unusual precision.

Watch it if: you're here for the antagonism-to-romance pipeline and nothing else.

The Sex Lives of College Girls (2021 · Max)

Four freshmen are assigned the same suite at Essex, an elite New England college: an overachiever, a senator's daughter, a scholarship student on financial aid, and a soccer player figuring out her sexuality. Comedy rather than drama, but the campus politics are real, and it's the funniest thing on this list by a wide margin.

Watch it if: you want the setting without the body count.

XO, Kitty (2023 · Netflix)

Kitty Song Covey transfers to an international boarding school in Seoul to surprise her long-distance boyfriend, and finds out approximately nothing about her life is what she thought. Bright, light, low stakes, extremely watchable on a bad day.

Watch it if: the others are too much and you want the sugar version.

If what you actually love is the underlying system — reputation as currency, a leaked secret ruining a marriage, everyone in the room performing for everyone else — that machinery works just as well in a ballroom. The Regency shelf is next door: 10 Regency Era Shows to Binge-Watch After Bridgerton.

Pick by symptom. Start tonight. You know you love it.