‘City on Fire’: How the ‘Gossip Girl’ Creators Brought Y2K Back to NYC
Y2K is all the rage right now. Steve Madden’s chunky platform sandals have returned as the latest fad, and shows like Gossip Girl and How I Met Your Mother have been rebooted (to varying success). That trend continues with the new Apple TV+ drama series City on Fire, which sees several youngsters in the early 2000s solving a mystery in Central Park, while also setting fires in the post-9/11 New York landscape.
It helps, then, that Stephanie Savage and Josh Schwartz—who created iconic series from the early aughts such as the original Gossip Girl and The O.C.—teamed up to adapt Garth Risk Hallberg’s novel of the same name. Though the series feels timeless, it has that overdramatic teen drama flair, which is something that star Chase Sui Wonders found alluring.
“My box sets of The OC are like rags,” Wonders says on a Zoom with The Daily Beast’s Obsessed. “I would quote The OC to Josh, and he’d be like, ‘I don’t know what you’re referencing.’ I’d be like, ‘I’m quoting Seth Cohen! You literally wrote these words.’