Everywhere you look, another Noughties teen star is back on top. While Blake Lively and Michelle Williams have been A-list more or less since their breakout hits, their co-stars’ ascents have been slow but steady for the past 20-ish years. But after some almost-hits and good faith missteps, they’re once again atop the TV pyramid. Millennials, we’re winning.
The number one show on Netflix is Nobody Wants This, a breezy but touching interfaith rom-com starring the always charming Adam Brody (forever The OC’s Seth Cohen in our hearts) and Veronica Mars herself, Kristen Bell. Bell found plenty of movie success post-Veronica (Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Frozen), and her NBC show The Good Place was well-received but quickly disappeared from cultural memory.
What comes after the end?
Nobody Wants This makes the best use of Bell’s talents in years. As Veronica, yes, she solved crimes and took names, but viewers fell in love with her quippy sarcasm. As self-deprecating podcast cohost Joanne on NWT, sassy Bell is back!
Meanwhile Brody’s wife, Leighton Meester of Gossip Girl fame, is joining the cast of The Buccaneers for season two, in addition to being attached to Bottoms co-writer Rachel Sennott's buzzy HBO pilot. She, too, is connected to Bell, who was the voice of Gossip Girl herself.
Meester’s previous post-GG foray into television, Single Parents, was underrated and fun, but frankly, her part could have been played by any brunette with an improv background. The Buccaneers, on the other hand, features luxurious period costumes, schemes and secrets. The skills she honed as Blair Waldorf make Meester the best addition the show could have asked for.
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The Dawson’s Creek alumni aren’t doing so bad, either. Joshua Jackson’s been on prestige TV for years (The Affair, Fatal Attraction), but his new show, Dr. Odyssey reaches a much wider audience. The reviews are inauspicious, but so what? He’s got his face plastered on billboards. His former love interest and fellow teen star Katie Holmes is on Broadway in Our Town, and as for the Creek-adjacent One Tree Hill, breakout star Chad Michael Murray is filming much-awaited sequel Freakier Friday.
But the takeaway here isn’t just that actors be acting. It looks like the entertainment industry finally got the message that the best way to capitalise on nostalgia isn't through reboots. Both the resurrected Pretty Little Liars and updated Gossip Girl have been axed, and I don't even want to talk about the Veronica Mars reboot (Logan! Please!).
No, the best way to engage the now-adult audiences who grew up in the 2000s is to give their favourite actors the right material.
You know who got it right away? The makers of You. Penn Badgley paying a tad too much attention to the lifestyles of the rich and perverted, à la havoc-wreaking blogger Dan Humphrey… it’s called playing to your strengths.
This article originally appeared in GLAMOUR US.
