When I first heard about the new CW series, “The Carrie Diaries” (a prequel to the life of Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City), my thought process went a little something like this:
Wait, what?? They’re dragging out SATC again?! You’d think after six seasons and two movies they’d realize that sooner or later their luck is going to run out and they’re just going to end up ruining it!!! Okay Kayla, calm down. this could be a good thing! A new setting, new people, maybe they won’t completely butcher it! Oh wait… AnnaSophia Robb is playing Carrie? She is soooo not Sarah Jessica Parker. Seriously like how you can live up to that role. SJP is Carrie Bradshaw. She must be so nervous. Okay, Maybe you should watch it. A true SATC fan needs to know how it plays out so she can justify either defending it or bashing it, right? No, bad idea, Kayla you are sooo not watching this. This is a disgrace to Carrie and her manolos.
And then January 14th rolled around and there I was, getting my fix. Obviously I thought my craving for a little bit more Carrie outweighed the possible harm I could get from watching the show. And obviously I was wrong.
Simply put, “The Carrie Diaries” just isn’t “Sex and the City.” Besides the fact that the main character’s name is Carrie Bradshaw and she lives, loves, and breathes fashion, there are almost no similarities between the two shows.
In “The Carrie Diaries,” Carrie lives with her Dad and sister Dorrit and is recovering after her mother’s death. Like, what? True SATC-er’s know that on episode 17 of season four, Carrie explicitly explains how her deadbeat dad walked out on her and her mother when she was 5. Okay, I know that Candace Bushnell made this change when she went back and wrote the book, The Carrie Diaries, (shame on her, by the way), but still, this is not the SATC I know.
Besides that, Carrie is just not Carrie. Instead she’s an innocent 16-year-old princess, completely sheltered from the world and everything in it. Where is my Carrie, who laughs obnoxiously at stupid things, runs down the streets of NYC after a taxi, gets splashed by a bus with her face on the side of it, and yet doesn’t care about a thing other than her friends, fashion, and of course, Big. She’s just not there in “The Carrie Diaries.”
In an interview on the Today show, Robb says, “We’re not trying to be Sex and the City.” Well now I’m thinking, clearly, because if you were, you did an awful job at it. But thanks, AnnaSophia, for not telling me that until after I anxiously watched the first few episodes, holding onto a sliver of hope that I might get to see a new side to my beloved Carrie Bradshaw. Seriously, if you didn’t want me to compare each and every detail, you shouldn’t have claimed to be a prequel to Carrie’s life in New York, just sayin’.
Now I’m here stuck trying to get all of this Dorrit/Dad nonsense out of my head. Thank god I have seasons 1-3 of SATC here in my dorm room… which episode should I watch tonight?