The Carrie Diaries-Pilot Review

There was a time when HBO’s Sex and the City was the shit. And I don’t just mean with women, I mean with everyone. In the late 90’s I didn’t have HBO, so I missed out on the early sexual escapades of Carrie Bradshaw and her friends, but I remember the show was on everyone’s lips, women and men alike. The idea of a show where women’s sexual appetites were viewed as largely similar to men’s was a major cultural turning point, and audiences flocked to it in droves. It wasn’t long before I joined in and became a huge fan too.

At some point, towards the end of the show’s run, it became the most important show for women in America from a cultural standpoint, and therefore men had to turn on it or run the risk of being seen as pussies. I distinctly remember straight guys I knew tell me “I would never watch that shit” and remember when, just a few years before, they would tell me how much they loved the show and would never miss an episode. I personally can’t understand why straight men would have such negative attitudes towards a show that encourages women to have lots of casual sex. Sounds like something they’d be 100% behind, but then what do I know. In any case, in its day the show was always appointment viewing for women and gay men all over the country, the very definition of zeitgeisty.

Of course, by the time the  Sex and the City movies came out, especially the second one, the series had become a parody of itself. The second movie was everything the shows detractors had always said it was, shallow and filled with meaningless product placements and women acting like bitches. It was an inglorious way for the franchise to end, but like all good pop culture icons, it seems Carrie Bradshaw has more than one incarnation, as witnessed by her rebirth last night on the CW’s The Carrie Diaries.

The “Early Years/Extended Origin” story has been a fixture of male-centric pop culture for the past decade. You could say that it started with Smallville, and since then we’ve had the “how it all began” stories told in film for iconic heroes like Batman, James Bond and Captain Kirk. So why shouldn’t women have their turn? And certainly for many American women, Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw has become a modern icon for them. Even though the series has been off the air for nine years now, and the last movie was less than stellar, I still hear young women talk about the show. It wasn’t too long ago that I was at a movie, and while eavesdropping on the gaggle of  loud young women behind me before the movie started, I heard the the ubiquitous “No I’M  the Carrie, and you’re the Miranda!” And the girls were way too young to have been watching when the show originally aired, which means the power of the show continues in repeats and via DVD. Having said all that, it makes sense that the powers-that-be would want to continue the franchise in some form and keep those Bradshaw Bucks coming.

The pilot episode takes place three months after the death of Carrie’s mother from cancer. The year is 1984 and Carrie is sixteen, and lives in Connecticut with her now widowed father and fourteen year old sister. This, of course, makes the first continuity gaff with Sex and the City; on that show it was said in one episode that Carrie’s father ran out on her mom when she was a five and she never really knew him. She also never, ever mentions having a sister. The producers of Sex and the City had this rule that the girls on the show were each other’s real family, and therefore their bio-families were almost never to be seen or mentioned. Still, it was one tiny mention in one episode, so it’s no real big deal that they threw it out for the sake of this series. Carrie is played by Anna Sophia Robb, known previously as a child actress in various movies like Charlie & The Chocolate Factory and Race to Witch Mountain. Although she really looks nothing like a young Sarah Jessica Parker, she still somehow manages to make me believe she’ll grow up and become her someday, so that’s to her credit as an actress. She exudes much of the same empathy that SJP did, and as an audience member I found myself instantly liking her. If her casting had not worked, this entire series would have failed from the word go.

Much as she will later in life, Carrie has a tight group of BFF’s in high school. First off there is Jill Thompson, or “Mouse”, Carrie’s recently de-virginized best friend, played by Ellen Wong. Then there is Walt (Brendan Dooling) her fashionable best guy friend. Of course, Walt is gay and in the closet, and is dating Carrie’s other best girlfriend Maggie, played by Katie Findlay, best knows as the titular victim of AMC’s The Killing, Rosie Larsen. Walt is clearly an early version of Carrie’s future “best gay” Stanford. I do love this aspect of the series; it is 1984 after all, and the chances that a young guy would come out in high school were slim to none. It would have been a major struggle for him, and from the pilot so far, the show seems to reflect that and is keen on making it a plot point. Maggie is secretly screwing around with an older guy who it turns out is a cop. I have to admit that I like the idea that the future writer of a column called Sex and the City is a virgin at 17. of course there is a love interest, handsome and rich Sebastian Kydd (Austin Butler) who is channeling his best Pretty in Pink Andrew McCarthy. He’s clearly being set up as Carrie’s main love interest, and the source of her future attraction for aloof rich guys. And like any high school show worth its salt, there is the bitchy popular girl, this time named Donna LaDonna. In the novel, Donna and Carrie eventually become buds, and Donna introduces Carrie to her cousin Samantha Jones when she moves to the city. None of the secondary characters are onscreen long enough to make much of an impression yet, but the truth is, none of Carrie’s friends made much of an impression in the Sex and the City pilot episode either. So I can give them time.

We are also introduced to Carrie’s younger sister Dorrit in the pilot. Dorrit is 14, and although she certainly doesn’t dress the part, she seems to be a little proto-goth (her bedroom walls are adorned with posters for The Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Joy Division. I like this kid already) Dorrit is taking their mother’s death much harder and lashing out in obvious ways. All of this stuff is your standard CW teen show stuff, riffing on the template laid out by My So Called Life nearly twenty years ago that every teen coming of age series has done ever since. Due to all the drama at home, Carrie’s dad gets her a weekend internship at a law office in Manhattan, and that’s where the fun part of the show actually starts. While in Manhattan, Carrie meets a Larissa, (Freema Agyeman) a hip British black girl who works at Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine. She loves Carrie’s custom made purse, and wants to use it in a photo shoot. She kind of adopts Carrie, without ever realizing she’s under age, and scoops her up into a world of fancy restaurants, hipster artists, cute boys and expensive fashion. This is a pretty clever conceit the show uses to keep her high school life back at home a part of the show and still show the origins of her love affair with the Big Apple and her early metamorphosis into the Sex and the City version of Carrie. In the New York portion of the show, some of the clothes and hair borders on costumey “Come As The 80’s” theme party, but truthfully, as someone who was there, I can tell ya a lot of the looks of the era really were this garish and gloriously tacky.

I have to admit, I started watching this show expecting to hate it and mock the shit out of it in this review. Part of the pure joy of Sex and the City was seeing a group of friends much like my own sit around and talk candidly about sex, and compare stories about giving bad blow jobs, meeting guys who wanna pee on you in the shower and all the other dirty stuff that this show will never, ever cover. Add to that, there is nothing remotely original about this show, like I said it is a variation on every teen show we’ve seen before, only we know the ultimate outcome of this series. It will be interesting to see how the producers can create long term drama out of this scenario, consider we all know that by her mid thirties, Carrie will still be single. No matter who she “ends up” with on this series, we as the viewers know it won’t be permanent.  And still, I buckled under the weight of so much awesomely bad 80’s fashion and awesomely great 80’s pop music (still the best era of pop music ever. You can argue with me all you want, but you’d just be wrong.) and the obvious charms of the show’s lead Anna Sophia Robb. In a few more episodes, I may get very sick of all this, and they can throw all the Nagel art and Yaz songs at me and It won’t work anymore, but for right now, I’m on board.