Harrison Burt
Blogs Editor
As the worlds biggest Sex and the City fan, I wasn’t sure what to expect when I heard that the CW had decided to launch a prequil to the 1998 TV series. The Carrie Diaries follows the infamous Carrie Bradshaw before she became New York’s bestselling columnist, as a struggling teenager in high school trying to find her passion. After months of speculation, critics felt that AnnaSophia Robb would never be able to fill the Manolo Blahnik shoes that Sarah Jessica Parker did, and I was expecting to mourn what had become my favorite show. However, I found myself pleasantly surprised.
The series opens in 1984 as a teenage Carrie’s alarm clock rings in her Connecticut classroom. We see that before the Cosmopolitans and weekly column, she was a quiet, responsible teen growing up in a suburb named Castlebury, Connecticut, fantasizing a life in the Big Apple. Having spent the summer grieving the loss of her mother to cancer, Carrie tries to hold her family together, especially her younger sister Dorrit.
We learn from scenes throughout the pilot that the icon’s fashion sense sparks from a deeper source than popular magazines, for her connection to extravagant clothing is her way of keeping her mom a part of her life.
Similar to the original, Carrie’s three best friends are her everything, and play as large a role in the show as she does. There is Mouse, a nerd who is in a desperate search for an “undying love”, Maggie, who draws multiple similarities to the promiscuous Samantha Jones, and Walt, their boy addition. Together ,they help Carrie with relationship struggles deciding between her personal relationships, and the one she has with herself.
On the first day of her junior year, Carrie’s father scores her a weekly internship at a law firm in downtown Manhattan. On her first day of work, Carrie meets style editor from Interview Magazine, Larissa, in a Century 21 store, who ends up taking her out into the city for the night. Carrie soon discovers that the only relationship she wants is one with Manhattan, and that some things are worth giving up everything for.
The Carrie Diaries is a great new show, and I presume it will continue to do well in the future. However, the CW needs to find its own voice in AnnaSophia’s character and stop trying to mimic the original’s. It was nice to see a tribute to the legend that is Sex and the City, but I think viewers will be able to connect more with a younger Bradshaw if she acted more her age. The best is yet to come.
