Instead of Sex and the City 3, Revive The Carrie Diaries

Last month, The UK’s Daily Mail reported that plans for a proposed third Sex and the City movie had been halted by the demands of star Kim Cattrall, who was said to be leveraging her participation in the film using projects she had in development that she wanted Warner Bros. to produce. Cattrall later denied the report, tweeting that she simply didn’t want to do a third film, while co-star Sarah Jessica Parker told Extra:

“It’s over. We’re not doing it. I’m disappointed. We had this beautiful, funny, heartbreaking, joyful, very relatable script and story. It’s not just disappointing that we don’t get to tell the story and have that experience, but more so for that audience that has been so vocal in wanting another movie.”

It was a sad end to a franchise that grossed nearly $700 million through two movies and earned seven Emmys, eight Golden Globes, three Screen Actors Guild awards, and a whole lot of pop culture buzz during its six-season run on HBO. Not only would this’ve been a way to fight against issues of representation women are faced with in the film industry, a third movie would’ve allowed Sex to go out on a creative (and commercial) high following the disastrous reception to Sex and the City 2, which nabbed a 27 on Metacritic and faced criticism for its bloated running time, portrayal of the Middle East, and crass materialism. 

Instead, the last breaths the franchise draws will have come from The Carrie Diaries, its low-key TV prequel based on the 2010 Candace Bushnell novel. Debuting in the wake of Sex and the City 2, The Carrie Diaries attempted to humanize a franchise (and character) that had seen better days; rather than showing the future fashion icon as the self-absorbed, emotionally erratic mess that she became, it reverted Carrie Bradshaw back to her senior year in high school and attempted to fill in the backstory that wasn’t presented in the main series. It showed a Carrie who was ambitious, grounded, and trying to find her way through her first romantic relationship, a Carrie whose sweetness, charm, and independence hadn’t been seen in quite a while. Unfortunately, the show premiering at a time when opinions on Sex and the City were decidedly negative combined with airing on a predominantly sci-fi/action network in The CW and making itself a fairly wholesome look at an adult property doomed its chances, with The Carrie Diaries moving to Fridays in season two before being quietly cancelled in May 2014.

Yet even with a fairly conclusive ending, if Warner Bros. doesn’t want to close the door on the Sex-verse just yet, reviving The Carrie Diaries is something they should consider. The series ending with Carrie graduating from high school gives a possible revival a wide berth in which to operate, as it could easily jump forward in time to show the beginnings of her journalism career in the mid-to-late 80’s; this not only acknowledges the passing of time since the series concluded its CW run, it opens the show up to more adult storytelling, allows the absence/reduced presence of characters we already know to be easily exposited, and pushes Carrie a little closer to the woman we met in the Sex and the City pilot. Sex began when Carrie was in her early 30’s, so now that we know what her life was like in her teens, getting a snapshot of who she was in her 20’s feels like the next logistical step, particularly since that’s when Carrie would eventually meet both Charlotte and Miranda. That explicit Sex connection would give a possible revival more juice, especially in the wake of the cancelled movie and people’s desire to see the four iconic Sex characters together, and the show could wipe its narrative slate clean as a result of how the series originally ended. As good as the supporting cast was during the first two seasons, and as much as I would love to follow everyone in a possible revival, it’s completely natural for high school friends to grow apart and with Sex and the City including no mention of anyone involved with The Carrie Diaries, it’d make narrative sense for the bulk of the supporting characters to be written out and/or have their presence greatly reduced going forward.

That way The Carrie Diaries could side step some of the issues that revivals run into – the only characters who have to come back are Carrie and Samantha, so contracts and the possibility of only getting part of your core cast back wouldn’t be nearly the landmine that they tend to become, while the show can grow with the actors vs. keeping the characters in perpetually the same state. Also helping matters when it comes to a revival is the current state of television, as both teen dramas and lighter dramedies have been coming back into fashion over the last year or two. With help from an earlier time slot and a summer full of Netflix bingeing, Riverdale season two doubled its season one high in the 18-49 demo and went 9x its high in teen demos, while 13 Reasons Why and Stranger Things have generated a lot of discussion among those even outside the target audience. Add in the surging ratings for fellow Darren Star property Younger, as well as the critical acclaim of Freeform magazine dramedy The Bold Type, CW telenovela Jane the Virgin, and the Gilmore Girls revival, and the TV environment is a little more friendly to shows like The Carrie Diaries than it was when the show was airing on The CW. Plus, as fractured as the TV industry might have become in the years since the show went off the air, it’s only led to more outside elements factoring into renewal decisions and an increase in the amount of shows whose role is more about branding than Live + Same Day ratings, an area where The Carrie Diaries struggled to keep its head above water. Sustainability for nichier shows on broadcast and ad-supporting cable platforms might be up for debate, particularly in a more crowded marketplace where it can be harder to break out, but that doesn’t change the fact that renewals are less cut-and-dry as they once were and networks are more willing to find ways to make passion projects work for them.

Which is why Netflix would be the ideal place for more Carrie Diaries. The series has been on the streaming platform for years as a result of a deal with The CW, which eventually evolved to the point where every series has its entire season put on the platform 8 days following its television finale. Presumably, if more Carrie Diaries were to come down the pike, Netflix would be the easiest place for it to land given the audience familiarity, the fact that they own the streaming rights, and Carrie‘s first renewal being significantly boosted by its online performance. Though it had a passionate, engaged audience throughout its run, The Carrie Diaries isn’t a title with a hard enough nostalgic kick (or high enough first-run ratings) to make it back to ad-supported television like an X-Files, Prison Break, or Will & Grace, despite the fact that The CW is actively courting female viewers again and there are cable networks who could use the buzz of something like Carrie and the Sex and the City brand recognition to break through the scripted clutter. It also helps that Netflix has slowly been carving out a teen/young adult brand through 13 Reasons Why, Stranger Things, and Atypical that The Carrie Diaries would both complement and add to and that Netflix can program for passion, as the likes of Lady Dynamite, Haters Back Off, and Sense8 clearly weren’t designed to be broadly appealing. As long as shows stimulate and engage with their bases, as well as keep their financials and production logistics under control, they can survive on Netflix and that includes Carrie, a young-skewing show that could build itself back up into something leaner.

One of the reasons the recent revival/reboot trend hasn’t left me too excited is the fact that everything that gets rebooted and revived was immensely successful and got to live out its full life span. Apart from maybe Arrested Development, you rarely see shows that were cut down before being able to fulfill their creative potential get a second chance, which is another layer to why I think The Carrie Diaries should be revived. It’s a subtle, thoughtful piece of teen nostalgia that was a victim of airing at the wrong place in the wrong time yet still has the power of the Sex and the City name behind it and if there was still enough interest in a third Sex movie for this entire kerfuffle to happen, something in the Carrie Bradshaw-verse should be able to generate a little heat, even in today’s fractured TV environment and despite its low first-run ratings. If ever there was a show with a quiet run that could be brought back, it’s something like this with an association to a bigger title that people are still clamoring more from. Instead of looking at the cancellation of Sex and the City 3 as the end of an era, shutting down the franchise before its inevitable reboot in 20 years, Warner Bros. should look at it as an opportunity to beef up one of the best TV titles of the decade, wipe out some of the bad associations audiences might have with the Sex and the City brand, and further expand its relationship with the streaming platform. It is the perfect time to bring back The Carrie Diaries and push Carrie Bradshaw, portrayed with a luminous, star-making performance by AnnaSophia Robb, into the next phase of her life in the Big Apple.