Interview: Amy B. Harris Talks About The Reality Of The Carrie Diaries

The CW’s new series The Carrie Diaries has been a pleasant surprise for many who have tuned in, and in it, behind a backdrop of 1980’s music, hair, and fashions, there is a level of heart that even people who didn’t grow up in that decade could identify with. Like Smallville showed Clark Kent’s first journeys toward becoming Superman, The Carrie Diaries is a similar origin story, showing how Carrie Bradshaw became the Carrie Bradshaw from HBO’s Sex And The City. It’s just that instead of a first flight, this one is about the first Manolo Blahnik shoes.

Helping bring The Carrie Diaries to life is a very talented and likable cast as well as some very good writers behind the scenes, including Amy B. Harris, the show’s Executive Producer who also developed TCD for television. Ms. Harris, whose previous credits include the original Sex And The City series, which means she has some experience writing Carrie Bradshaw’s voice, participated in a Q&A on Friday where she talked about the elements that make the show “totally rad.”

Part of what seems to work for the show is that although the series takes place decades ago, the reality of situations — whether it’s seeing your crush with your own worst enemy, or the adult act of having sex in a bed next to a Mickey Mouse phone from your childhood — is universal. “I have a niece and a nephew who are of this age, and they both talk about how much this show feels like it’s speaking to the experiences they are having, and that was always my hope. That as much as this is the prequel to Sex And The City, because it’s Carrie Bradshaw, what I’d most hoped for when I was writing is that kids the age of the show who are watching it would feel like the way Sex And The City, for women, felt like ‘these are the things I’m talking about, thinking about, relating to.’ That was my hope for the show, that teenagers would come to the show and feel like ‘I’m secretly thinking about these things, or whispering them at tables with my girlfriends.’ I hoped that that would be relatable for the age group that is the age group of the characters. That’s always my hope, that it feels real and relatable. You have your [Mickey] Mouse phone that you got when you were 14 or 12, and you’re now five to seven years past that, but those relics of your childhood are still there as you’re growing into adulthood and coming of age,” she explains.

One storyline that Ms. Harris seems to be particularly invested in properly and realistically telling is the story of Brendan Dooling’s character Walt. His journey is also one that would be significantly different in 1984 vs. what you would see today… in most places, at least. “2013 is obviously a much better time to know you’re gay in high school, for a lot of people,” she explains. “Not for everyone. There are still plenty of towns out there where, yes, you’ll get to go watch TV shows and go on to blogs and watch tapes of famous people saying it will get better, but you’re still the only kid struggling with your sexuality in a high school, you think. I mean, there could be ten other kids; it’s just no one’s talking about it, and what, for me, was so compelling about being able to tell this story in 1984, is that the truth is, nobody was coming out in high school.”

The original plan for Walt — whose story does progress a bit in Candace Bushnell’s first Carrie Diaries novel — may have happened a little differently from what ended up happening on the show. “When I wrote the pilot, I actually thought I would have him come out a lot faster,” she reveals, “but then when I watched the pilot, I realized that in the time frame it’s in, this is a very difficult thing. People don’t know other people are gay, Carrie in the pilot, two guys kiss in front of her in Manhattan… there is a place you can go to where it is safer and more comfortable, but as you see in Episode 104, there are still plenty of people even in the city who would like to gay-bash. I wanted to tell this story in a longer, drawn out way because I think it’s the truth, which, even now, it can be really hard to come out, and I wanted that experience to be real for Walt, which is, I think, painful and scary, and Brendan brings such a life to it,” she says.

“I also didn’t want it just to be like ‘oh, I’m gay. I’m attracted to men’,” she explains. “I like the idea that he will have a crush on a man, which I think is a little bit of a differentiation than just, like, ‘I’m only attracted to men.’ It’s like ‘the person I see myself romantically with is a guy,’ and I want to pursue that this season for him. Having to come to terms with even that emotional place, versus the physical, is scary.” That said, might Walt meet someone soon… and if he does, will it be someone his own age? “That’s the tricky thing about 1984 Castlebury, Connecticut. I don’t even know if he knows if there’s anybody his age that’s out there,” she says. She may have offered a small tease. “We’ve introduced Bennett, and he returns, so…” she tells us.

Contributing to the reality of The Carrie Diaries and the Sex And The City universe is that many viewers, including the writers of the shows, identify with Carrie, and even back when they were in the Sex And The City writers’ room over a decade ago, Carrie’s past is something they all would talk about.  “We all talked about young Carrie, because we were all very close with our parents, and very much shaped by either the dysfunctions in our parents’ relationships or the romance that we’d imbued into our parents’ relationships until we got older,” she confirms. “This was a thing we always fell into. Everyone thinks they’re Carrie. Fans think they’re Carrie, so certainly, writers on the show, we all imbued Carrie with our own back stories, I think, to some degree. To the point even with other characters. When we were discussing, when Miranda’s mom dies, what kind of family she’s from, we all had completely different points of view,” she laughs. “Somebody thought she was from an upper class family in Philadelphia, and she was one of many children to have gone to college, and then somebody else thought she was from a total blue collar family… we were all coming with our own backstories, so I certainly brought all of that to the Carrie that we’re writing now. I’m one of two siblings; I’m very close to my father. He is a lawyer who expected me to become a lawyer. He hasn’t figured it out that I’m writing him yet, which I think is so funny. He’s like, ‘I really like Tom!’ My mother has not said, ‘I’m dead? Thanks a lot!’ But, yeah. I’m definitely writing a lot of the personal journey I took to become a writer, and kind of defying my parents’ expectations of who they’d hoped I would be,” she says.

If the Sex And The City writers thought of the characters’ pasts, might the writers of The Carrie Diaries have wondered what happens in their futures? More specifically, have they wondered why characters like Mouse, Maggie, and Walt seem to have no place in Carrie’s 21st-century future? “I have thought about it a lot, actually, and I feel like we have some good ideas for why they’re not around, and some of them are… yeah. We’ve been thinking a lot about that. You know, look: I think everybody sort of [wonders] ‘How is she going to meet the Sex And The City characters?’ We’ve been thinking about that a lot, and then I’ve also been thinking about where these important people in your high school life go, and I think the reality is a lot of your high school friends sort of disappear, and some don’t, and that will be fun to play with,” she tells us.

A new episode of The Carrie Diaries airs Monday night, February 11, at 8PM on The CW. Here’s a preview clip featuring Walt (Brendan Dooling) and Mouse (Ellen Wong):