Back in the early 2000s, Gossip Girl was the most-talked about teen drama on everyone’s Facebook page. The lives of the scandalous teens running the Upper East Side took the world by storm and catapulted its lead stars to fame. The network tried to capitalize on Gossip Girl‘s success with a potential spinoff series about Serena van der Woodsen’s mother Lily and her sister Carol, with Brittany Snow and Krysten Ritter playing the two leading roles.
The spinoff was introduced as a backdoor pilot; the Season 2 episode “Valley Girls” involved Lily having flashbacks to her teen days while dealing with yet another of Serena’s scandals. Lily had Serena falsely arrested for theft. The incident was intended to be a teaching moment for Serena, but it also reminded Lily of her own brush with the law at Serena’s age — and the flashback made more sense than the one in the Saved by the Bell reboot.
Back in 1983, Lily was struggling to cope with her parents’ divorce. Lily feared that her father Rick would forget about her if they didn’t live together, so she got herself kicked out of boarding school like Hagrid from Hogwarts. She arranged to meet Rick in Malibu for lunch and was surprised to discover her mother CeCe there and her parents having already arranged for her to return to school. Rick claimed that he was too busy with work to be a present parent and didn’t want Lily to turn out like her older sister Carol. Unhappy with this development, Lily went against her parents’ wishes and ran off to find Carol instead.
Lily met a busboy named Owen who worked with Carol at a Los Angeles diner; he convinced Lily to swap her Gucci blazer for a leather jacket and took her to a club to find Carol. The Rhodes sisters were reunited amidst a crowd of punk fans enjoying a performance by the local band Snowed Out, played by the members of No Doubt. Snow and Ritter may have been playing sisters, but their characters couldn’t have been more different. Lily was a preppy blonde who enjoyed the comforts of being wealthy, while Carol was a raven-haired rebel who dreamed of being an actress. The spinoff, also titled Valley Girls, would have centered around their relationship and explained how Lily went from being an upper-class snob to a grunge groupie.
Carol dragged Lily, Owen and their friend Shep to a house party where she planned to break in and steal her music video back from a greedy director. The director in question happened to be someone named Keith van der Woodsen — and his snobbish mistreatment of Carol resulted in a fight breaking out at the party. Lily and Owen ended up getting arrested, but Carol bailed Lily out and promised to guide her to a life of independence without the support of their family’s wealth.
“Valley Girls” was well-received by fans and critics, but The CW decided against proceeding with the spinoff, consigning it to the graveyard later occupied by Green Arrow and the Canaries and several Supernatural spinoffs before the upcoming prequel. Some of the newly introduced story points, such as Lily’s relationship with Owen, were abandoned in the process. There was also some confusion about the Keith van der Woodsen character, since he could have been Serena’s estranged father. William van der Woodsen was introduced in Gossip Girl Season 3 and viewers assumed Keith was his brother or cousin.
Gossip Girl fans were disappointed that they never got to find out about Lily’s backstory, but the failure of Valley Girls wasn’t bad for the lead actresses. Krysten Ritter went on to claim the role of Jane Margolis in Breaking Bad, which is now considered one of the best television dramas of all time. She also snagged the lead roles in Don’t Trust the B—- in Apartment 23 and Marvel’s Jessica Jones. Brittany Snow was cast in the David E. Kelley legal drama Harry’s Law shortly after the cancellation, but is now best known for her role in the Pitch Perfect trilogy.
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