There is an extremely 2020 joke doing the rounds at the minute that goes something along the lines of “but if we abolish the police, who will solve crimes?” “white women with podcasts, duh”. The joke, while funny, is incorrect. Not about abolishing the police, obviously we should do that. But this generation’s true detectives are not white women with podcasts — they’re teens with TikTok.
Take, for instance, their work uncovering the shoddy costume mistakes of everyone’s favourite insane 00s teen drama, Gossip Girl. Zoomers, potentially using lockdown to binge the show for the first time, are more eagle-eyed than their millennial counterparts. In one video it’s revealed that in a party scene in season five — around the era where everything started to become more mad than ever and the GG writers, like the Riverdale writers of today, just decided that their characters no longer needed to have any semblance of a normal teen life anymore — an extra is seen in the background wearing only one shoe.
But it doesn’t just stop there. Another TikTok detective spotted an even more bizarre moment in season six, with Serena van der Woodsen wearing some comfy grey tracksuit under her Herve Leger pink bodycon dress.
Honestly, these videos raise more questions than they answer. Could it be the case that the show was originally filmed in a different ratio and that our current, wider screens are revealing elements that would have been cut out in the original broadcast? Maybe. But maybe Gen Z are simply more observant than Gossip Girl’s original millennial audience. Where the teens of the noughties simply pretended not to see it, the zoomers have their eyes open. Lazy costume designers beware.