‘Girls’ star Jemima Kirke was too cool to watch ‘Gossip Girl’ but her new show is set in 2003 and mines millennial nostalgia

For an icon of millennial television, Jemima Kirke, best known as Jessa in “Girls,” has some surprising gaps in her knowledge of the early ’00s pop culture canon.

Like, for instance, “Gossip Girl” and “The O.C.”

“I never saw those shows,” said Kirke, who appeared on a video link wearing uplifting tangerine, speaking in a British drawl that throws you since much of her acting is conducted in a pitch-perfect American accent. (She comes by it honestly: born in London, Kirke grew up in New York City and now lives in Brooklyn.)

This is relevant because Kirke’s new series, “City on Fire,” out today on Apple TV Plus, is set in early 2000s Manhattan, and created by Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, the same executive producers who made those generation-defining teen soaps that were omnipresent in the last days before streaming and social media. (Raise your hand if you can remember exactly where you were when Marissa died.)

The link was not nostalgic catnip to Kirke. “I was actually nervous when I saw those references, because I’m not used to doing those types of tightly written shows,” said Kirke, who is more versed in improv.

She points to her role in “Conversations With Friends,” the 2022 series based on a Sally Rooney novel. “That was basically all subtext — nothing was said, everything was acted.” In the end, she said, it was beneficial to be constrained by the script. “It helped me grow as an actor, because the only reason a line doesn’t work for me is because it’s my first read of it,” she said. “My first read is never the right one, once I really think about it.”

Kirke was, of course, a ur-cool girl of the 2010s, indie to her bones, who spent the first decade of her career playing various versions of this trope onscreen. So it makes sense that project this was “such a jump” for her. “I’d never done anything like this, that was written by people who know how to make a show that is engaging for everyone and engaging at every moment,” said Kirke. “It’s more commercial and not in a bad way. It just reaches a broader audience.”

A whodunit that centres on the shooting of a young woman in New York City’s Central Park on the Fourth of July, “City on Fire” is replete with all the elements that made those pulpy shows from the early ’00s so great.

There’s the interconnected web of characters from disparate backgrounds, all with secrets to hide, and an innocent outsider in the mould of Dan Humphrey or Seth Cohen to act as the audience’s stand-in as they navigate a murky new world. The setting swings between the abandoned warehouses of the underground music scene and the sinister polish and excess of the Upper East Side. Think “Veronica Mars” meets “The City” and you’re close, just add a few more cliffhangers and someone setting fires all around the city.

Kirke plays Regan Hamilton-Sweeney, a 30-something straining under the weight of competing crises: a looming scandal that threatens her family’s real estate empire, her husband’s affair and, after years of silence, news that her brother, the family’s black sheep, seems to be struggling again with addiction.

“She’s not someone I would normally be approached to play, this sort of buttoned up, Type A, very together businesswoman and mother who does it all,” said Kirke. “That’s such an archetype that we know so well and I didn’t want to play her as she was written. I wanted to bring something to her that made her more nuanced and more of an enigma.”

Regan’s connection to her artistic, troubled brother was Kirke’s “in” to this character’s psyche. “She has this other side to her,” said Kirke, mentioning a scene in which Regan discovers that her husband has been cheating on her with Sam, a free-spirited NYU indie scenester, and yells, “I used to be that girl!”

“That was such a heartbreaking moment,” said Kirke. “She’s trying to keep this family together, she has so much responsibility and yet he also wants her to be like she was.”

As Kirke said, it’s particularly tragic because “we can never go back to who we were five, 10, 15 years ago — and when someone wants us to, it’s not only a betrayal, it’s a point of insecurity.”

Speaking of going back in time: this show is set in 2003, which is trippy for people old enough to have watched “Gossip Girl” and “The O.C.” when they first came out.

“I was 17, in my last year of high school. That’s exactly how old Sam is,” said Kirke. She also hung out at the hotspots you see in “City on Fire,” like the Greenwich Village club Don Hill’s.

“I went every Thursday night like clockwork,” said Kirke. “It was ’80s night and it was the most fun ever. No one stopped dancing.” The night always began with “Like a Prayer” and ended with “Come On Eileen,” she remembered. There was a stripper pole and a DJ who’d dance with the crowd. “It would probably be disgusting now because it’s been closed forever,” said Kirke. “It was surreal to play an adult in that time period and not who I was,” Kirke said.

It’s becoming clearer that the reason she didn’t watch those big noughties shows along with the rest of us is that she was just way too cool to be sitting at home in a Juicy Couture tracksuit. But we already knew that.

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