The CW premieres The Carrie Diaries tonight at 8PM (ET), and in addition to a great 80’s vibe, the series revisits the character Carrie Bradshaw, the center of the Sex And The City series that aired on HBO.
Both Carrie and SATC came from author Candace Bushnell before being adapted to television. The Carrie Diaries novels, specifically, have had at least one of Carrie’s future friends within some later volumes. Might these characters — Samantha, Miranda, or Charlotte — be showing up on TV sooner rather than later?
“That’s up to Amy,” Candace Bushnell said to press yesterday at the TCA Press Tour, referring to Carrie Diaries TV showrunner Amy B. Harris.
Harris responded that her first priority is to introduce us to this Carrie Bradshaw. “My whole thing when we first started developing this series was let’s get to know Carrie,” she said. “It’s obviously a new actor playing a very iconic role that was so beautifully filled by Sarah Jessica, and I felt like let’s get to know Carrie, see her world really develop, this new world that we’re in. An then, yes, I’ve definitely thought about different ways that we will meet her three other friends, but I really felt like, at least initially, just let people enjoy this new universe, kind of get sucked in, and then hopefully we can have a lot of fun with how they get introduced, and I’ve thought a lot about that.”
As for whether or not those iconic meetings will match what can be read in the books, Harris responded that some would, but some would not. The show also deviates from the books a bit in that there are a few friends from the Carrie Diaries novel as well as a sibling for Carrie who are missing in the show. “Some of it, losing the sister and a couple of the friends, is just about kind of creating a really clean number of characters to kind of play with every week,” Harris said, “and then, for me, I really saw this as an origin story. If you look at Smallville, which I think is a very good example, where you’re meeting Clark Kent before he realizes he has super powers. If you’re meeting Carrie Bradshaw, I wanted to meet her before she had sex, before she fell in love, and before she met Manhattan. So, for me, the fun of it was like let’s get to those things. Like let’s set her on those paths, and Manhattan was such a huge part of it, I really wanted to explore that in the first season,” she explained.
Candace Bushnell seems to be fine with the changes. “The reality is that books and TV series are like apples and oranges,” she said. “You know, a book has a beginning, middle, and end, and a TV series, ideally we want it to go on and on and on. So there are just certain requirements to a series that, I think, you know, shapes a lot of the decisions that one makes in taking something from a book to a series. And actually having adapted a couple of other books to scripts, I mean, the first thing I do, even with my own work, is basically just throw everything out and kind of start over again. It’s a, you know ‑‑ a TV series every episode ‑‑ it’s very structured, and it has to have a certain integrity to it, and we want to see those same characters again and again every week. So, I mean, I couldn’t be happier.”
The Carrie Diaries premieres tonight on The CW. Take a look at some pictures of the show’s attractive cast:
KSiteTV Editor-In-Chief Craig Byrne has been writing about TV on the internet since 1995. He is also the author of several published books, including Smallville: The Visual Guide and the show's Official Companions for Seasons 4-7.
