To cheer Carrie up and presumably reward her maturity, her father (Matt Letscher) arranges an internship at a Lower Manhattan law firm every Friday. No sooner is Carrie loosed on New York than she winds up in the Century 21 frock emporium and befriends an Interview magazine photographer (Freema Agyeman) who invites her to cocktails and dancing at Indochine with an assortment of late-Warholian-era hipsters.
There’s so much to get wrong about all this that it’s a relief to see “The Carrie Diaries” striving to get so much right, as far as the period details (girls with heavier eyebrows; walls decorated with Patrick Nagel prints) and the mood of the 1980s. Not everything is perfect — the World Trade Center is conspicuously absent from skyline shots 17 years before its destruction; and not one of these girls is sporting a perm-mullet.
Hank Stuever
Hank Stuever is The Washington Post’s TV critic and author of two books, “Tinsel” and “Off Ramp.”
Like anyone else who was in high school in 1984, I am duty-bound to quibble with such details, as well as fondly remember when an actual teenage Sarah Jessica Parker braved adolescence in the beloved but short-lived “Square Pegs” in 1982-83. If “The Carrie Diaries” passes my sniff test (and comes out smelling like a strawberry-scented Swatch watch) then it ought to pass yours.
It’s all so full circle, isn’t it? “Sex and the City” so thoroughly colored and influenced trend culture in the 1990s and 2000s that it seems almost criminally unfair to let it also take a whack at the MTV era. After all, isn’t “Sex and the City” at least partially responsible for ruining New York, for driving up its cost of living and flooding it with tourists in search of cosmos, cupcakes and Jimmy Choos? Does it have a right to now dreamily fetishize a dirtier, cheaper and more authentic New York?
Well, that’s a war for Fran Lebowitz and other Gotham grumps to wage. The producers and writers of “The Carrie Diaries” (with their “Gossip Girl” and “Sex and the City” pedigrees) appear to be working from a place of reverence — not just for the ’80s, but also for the original promise of “Sex and the City,” which was horribly marred by its big-screen sequels.
This Carrie is managing two worlds: high school, with its cliques and wannabes, and a budding romance with the bright lights and the big city. Her friends (Ellen Wong and Katie Findlay) are losing their virginities, while another (Brendan Dooling) struggles with his homosexuality. Heady from her night with the Danceteria crowd, Carrie of course jots it all down in a notebook (there are no laptops or bejeweled cellphones yet). Cue a tender ballad version of “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” while, in the earnest style of Carrie’s “Sex and the City” columns, she reaches for one of the first of her million, inelegant metaphors: She has lost her virginity, she realizes. Not to a boy, but to a town.
I know, I know — gag me with a spoon.
But that’s how it goes with stories about New York and its naifs. You must accept the gobbledygook they spout with each self-discovery, or you have to tune it out entirely.
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