Elite: Spanish take on Gossip Girl is TV gold – and your next favourite binge

In our series Stream Team, Guardian Australia’s arts writers dig out their favourite hidden gems of streaming to help you while away some isolated hours.

Like any former Gossip Girl tragic, I’ve spent the better part of the last decade trying – and failing – to fill the Upper East Side-shaped hole in my heart.

I’ve consumed every piece of media even tangentially related to the original. Some have come close: Riverdale, with its menagerie of misbehaving teens; Dynasty’s reboot, in all its brand-name opulence; even reality TV bandwagoners like NYC Prep, providing guilty indulgences into the lifestyles of the rich and (briefly) famous. But no show has quite lived up to Gossip Girl’s moreish absurdity.

Well, no show except one.

Enter: Elite, a Spanish teen soap-slash-murder mystery set at Las Encinas, a private school for the heirs and heiresses of billion-dollar fortunes.

Created by Carlos Montero and Darío Madrona, and streaming in full on Netflix, Elite somehow manages the impossible – taking all the campy, catty qualities which made Gossip Girl great while leaving its worst plot holes and contrivances (season four onwards, I’m looking at you) where they belong: locked away in Blair Waldorf’s closet.

Speaking of Blair, she meets her match in Elite’s queen bee Lucrecia (Danna Paola), the sassy, permanently bejewelled daughter of a Mexican ambassador whose headband collection rivals her Manhattan counterpart’s.

Then there’s her boyfriend, resident hunk Guzman (Miguel Bernardeau), and his free-spirited (but still rich, in case that wasn’t obvious) sister Marina (Maria Pedraza), as well as long-term it-couple Polo and Carla (Álvaro Rico Ladera and Ester Expósito) who might just be secretly manipulating each other.

If all this is sounding like a shopping list of tired high school tropes, never fear: they’re upended before the pilot episode is even out. A series of shady dealings schemed by Guzman’s construction magnate father leads to the roof collapsing at a nearby public school. The result: three of its working-class students – Nadia (Mina El Hammani), Samuel (Itzan Escamilla) and Christian (Miguel Herrán) – get a free ride to Las Encinas.

“This is fucking paradise, man,” Christian smirks as he walks up to the school building on his first day. He doesn’t know the hell that’s about to break loose.

I won’t spoil too much about the murder that frames the show, but suffice to say that it leaves no character unsuspected. Flicking between police interrogations and teen drama, Elite’s flashback structure creates some kind of alchemy, one which turns blood (of murdered students), sweat (of couples – and throuples – getting it on) and tears (of betrayed best friends) into television gold. And that’s just season one.

Thanks to its razor-sharp writing, it manages to remain nail-biting throughout its supercharged teenage distractions – think raucous pool parties, locker-room fights and beautiful people backstabbing each other. The writing is also what sustains it through another two seasons (and hopefully the just-announced fourth), set in the aftermath of the murder investigation. Unlike its TV predecessors, which tended to jump the shark too early in desperate hopes that increasingly bombastic scenarios could reclaim falling ratings, Elite only proves more and more considered.

Sure, each season brings with it a new juicy, deranged mystery: another death, a sudden disappearance. But, equally importantly, every member of its ensemble cast is given time to stew and develop. One of the sweetest queer romances – maybe ever – blossoms. Class loyalties break in the face of unlikely friendships.

Elite stops just short of calling for all-out class warfare a la Britney Spears, but it’s still crazy that a show about the sociopathically rich – and just plain sociopathic – ends up … kind of wholesome?

Come for the trashy escapism, stay for the addictive character arcs that’ll leave you scrolling through discussion forums and stars’ social accounts for far longer than Elite’s 24-episode run. It’s the distraction we deserve right now.

• All seasons of Elite are available on Netflix