Last night, at the Television Critics Association press tour, I mentioned to Josh Schwartz that he'd finally officially confirmed the Gossip Girl spinoff plans, after months of denials. Said Schwartz, "Yeah, we were forced out of hiding to tell the truth."

Schwartz explained, "I'm not a big believer in talking about things until they happen and unfortunately, once we went to start casting, [script] sides got out, agents started hearing about it and it became virtually impossible to keep it quiet. It was either we come out with it or somebody was going to break the story. We were forced to come clean."

The spinoff is a prequel set in the 1980s, starring the teen version of the Gossip Girl  character Lily. The set up finds Lily kicked out by her rich parents and moving in with her sister in Los Angeles' more middle class San Fernando Valley. As someone who grew up in the valley, I wondered just how "wrong side of the tracks" Schwartz was going to make it, and referenced his former series The O.C., asking, "Are you going to make the Valley the new Chino?" Replied Schwartz, "Just remember, our hero came from Chino! It was our Nazareth." He said they hadn't chosen the specific area Lily would live in, but noted, "We were talking about North Hollywood. My wife is from the Valley, so I have a lot of affection for the Valley."

If the Gossip Girl  spinoff is picked up, it will mean that the character of Lily will be appearing on two shows at the same time, albeit at different times of her life. Schwartz joked that, "We're just looking at blowing people's minds." More seriously, he said, "That's actually part of the fun for us is we can introduce characters on the spinoff, and then they can show up in the present and vice versa, so the two things can kind of inform each other. So there is a few times it'll be like Back to the Future Part II where we're like, 'Wait, where are we in the storytelling?" but that's also what's really exciting about it to us."

Asked if there were multiple concepts for the spinoff considered, Schwartz said, "We had no other ideas. For me and for Stephanie [Savage] to do another teen drama, it was going to need to be something exciting, because we'd done a couple of them now and feel like we needed something that was going to inspire us, so we weren't really going to do it. And then we started talking about this [80s concept] and that got us really excited."

The potential Gossip Girl  spinoff will be introduced via flashback scenes in a spring episode of Gossip Girl .