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It's 1984. Carrie Bradshaw doesn't know she's Carrie Bradshaw yet, but she does know how to deliver an almost-constant narration.
Carrie's mom is dead from cancer. This is important. Also, she has a 14-year old sister named "Dorrit." Carrie can't go to school without her mom's purse because it's totally a thing, Dad, and you just wouldn't understand. Dad really doesn't understand, acting surprisingly insensitive for a man whose wife just died three months ago and left him with a "troubled" daughter named Dorrit.
Carrie has three friends, three enemies, and one love interest in high school. The friends are a smart shy Asian named "The Mouse," a slutty friend with boobs, and a closeted gay guy who is dating the slutty one. Her enemy is Donna LeDonna, whose friends are called "The Jens." You don't want to be one of "The Jens" in high school, but you do want to be the person who grows up to come up with these character names. Speaking of bullshit names, her love interest's name is Sebastian Kidd.
Carrie and Sebastian connected after one hot, pool-filled summer, during which they kissed and unintentionally referenced Dirty Dancing. Carrie is still a virgin, and worried about it. The school is having a dance and she wants to ask Sebastian but faints before she can get the chance.
Carrie's mom-death-related fainting spell prompts her dad to suggest an internship at a law firm in Manhattan for one day a week. This is Carrie's dream (in more ways than one), so she's excited. Day one of her questionable internship, Carrie rips her pantyhose due to constantly being bumped into when she's marveling at the city.
Carrie's oddly-chaste-and-God-fearing-but-divorced supervisor suggests Carrie go to Century 21 for some new stockings. At the department store, Carrie meets Larissa, a fabulous black British shoplifter who works for Interview magazine and only shoplifts because she can. Carrie thought she was a mugger but she's totally not. Larissa only steals from The Man. Larissa invites Carrie to a party, but it's the same night as that dance she wants to see Sebastian at. Life-altering decisions.
Larissa sends Carrie a dress at work, which the confusingly stale supervisor remarks looks like "something that singer would wear ... you know, the one who takes the Lord's name in vain?" She's talking about Madonna, which sways Carrie's decision toward living it up at some party in 1980s New York. This turns out to be the right choice, as Carrie enjoys free champagne, artists and gay men in New York City, while relatively little happens at the high school dance.
Donna LeDonna tries to steal Sebastian away, but they really only ended up smoking together in a red sports car. It seems like a non-issue. Carrie's sister Dorrit goes missing, but comes back and hardly fights with anyone before taking all her dark makeup off and going through the late Mrs. Bradshaw's closet with the rest of her family. Carrie's dad accepts that his wife is gone, Sebastian shows up at the pool again, and Carrie finds some of her mother's old diaries to begin The Carrie Diaries we were promised.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!"It's always the same dream," The Carrie Diaries begins, with the classic Carrie Bradshaw narrative. Yes, I think to myself, it is always the same dream. Young girl wants to go to New York and make it big and wear beautiful clothes and write columns like a regular Carrie Bradshaw. Except this time it is Carrie Bradshaw. Not that many viewers of this show can be expected to know what that means.
Really, who is this show for? It's not for older fans of Sex and the City, who wouldn't bother with this show; and it's not for fans of Gossip Girl because it doesn't have the sex or the camp. So it's for tweens who have a vague idea of who Carrie Bradshaw is and are about to re-define it? Let's go with that for now.
Anyway, Carrie isn't talking about a dream like the dream of being on Buh-roadwayyyyyyy. She's talking about an actual recurring dream. (Do people really have those? They must if people keep referring to them in movies and TV shows.) But then she gets bumped out of her New York haze and out of her dream.
"I always wake up the same old Carrie Bradshaw," the narration says, as though we didn't know the significance. The original version of "Melt With You" is underscoring this moment so hey, history lesson, it's the 1980s. Like most teenagers (FART), Young Carrie Bradshaw knows exactly what she wants to do with her life. Yes, that was a sarcastic fart. Nobody knows anything, especially not at 16ish. Though I guess being "a writer" fits in pretty well with this whole "dream" we're talking about.
No 16-year old pre-Sex and the City wants to be a sex columnist, though. And I don't think we'll ever be referring to The Carrie Diaries as such an influential square in our television crazy quilt. But I'm getting ahead of myself, and this is getting way, way too meta. Young Carrie Bradshaw doesn't know what Sex and the City is because it's the '80s, and because she is Carrie Bradshaw, and hypothetically exists within the same charmed world Sarah Jessica Parker's Carrie Bradshaw would. Ow, Carrie Diaries, you makin' my head hurt.
And hold the phone, Carrie has a sister? A GOTHIC sister. A gothic sister who hides pot in her top drawer, which Carrie finds only seconds after opening said drawer in search of "Mom's purse." Then Carrie and her sister slow-motion fight to eighties music, and I am really not sure who this show is for now.
This purse is clearly a big deal, and nobody is making a big deal about "Dorrit," the first weird name of this show, written by bored people who read too much Sweet Valley High.
"I need a piece of her," Carrie tells her father, void of subtlety. In an important moment linking the super-past to the not-so-distant past of Sex and the City, Carrie's blank slate/Will Schuester of a dad lets her into her mom's closet to pick out some clothes and accessories, and find significance in a "last birthday" dress that I sure hope leads to a Can't Buy Me Love throwback. (I want Carrie to wear the dress out, against her father's wishes, and then to spill wine on it and the only way she can buy a new one is by dating a nerd to make him more popular. Everyone will learn a lesson about what nerds look like with their shirts off).
At school, everyone looks at Carrie as "the freak who lost her mom," except our villainess "Donna LeDonna." Donna LeDonna is a straight up bitch with no redeeming qualities. We hate her, she has minions called "the Jens" (or maybe just one giant Scandinavian guy who calls himself "The Jens"), and she has nothing better to do than use Carrie's dead mom for personal gain.
Carrie's friends are an Asian, a rambunctious slut, and a gay guy. Some things never change, holla! The friends announce that there is a new hot piece at school named "Sebastian Kidd." I can't stand these teen romance novel names, but I appreciate a toe in the pool of campier waters. Sebastian looks like that guy they wrote out of Glee for a while, but isn't. Yup, not Chord Overstreet, although that name would fit right in on this show.
It's a nice touch that the slutty friend and the gay friend are "dating." I see what you did there, show. I can't catch what the slutty friend's name is, but I know I would have been her had I the confidence or the rack. The Asian girl is called "Mouse," and she met someone over the summer. The Mouse lost her virginity to this character Seth, leaving Carrie to be the last virgin.
Naturally, there's a dance, and Carrie's friends urge her to ask Sebastian. Carrie contemplates this in a narrative, walking slowly, her arms filled with composition notebooks. I kid you not, this is exactly how I envisioned my high school self in the '80s and '90s. Something about the way Kelly Kapowski held her books. But I digress...
Carrie sits to Sebastian on a bench and talks about what I think Eckhart Tolle calls "the thinker." But this conversation is too metaphysical for Sebastian, who is more Blaine than Ducky. Sebastian thinks it's "cool" that Carrie has "so much going on in [her] head." Sebastian touches Carrie's hand a little too soon, bringing forth a flashback to a magic Sandy and Danny type of summer, which involved pool kissing and that Dirty Dancing move.
Carrie is about to ask Sebastian to the dance when she sees her dad in the hallway, which reminds her of when her mom was dying, and she faints. I bet Donna LeDonna and The Jens think this is hilarious, because they are not real people. Sebastian catches her, which teaches young girls to rely on handsome teenage boys, when they would never ever do that. I fell down three to four stairs once and my not-teenage boyfriend just laughed.
Carrie's dad offers Carrie "a change of pace, a change of scenery," an internship one day a week at a law firm in Manhattan. Yes, the Manhattan. Carrie's father, who is entirely undeveloped as a character, tells her she will need to prove herself. Carrie also knows that she'll need to get that purse back from Dorrit.
In an odd turn of events that I'm sure will go relatively unexplained, Carrie finds the purse inside a giant teddy bear that Dorrit has filled with scarves and nail polish and shit. She stuffed open bottles of nail polish in there, evidently, because the purse is "covered in nail polish." Ah, I hate when I leave my nail polishes open as I'm hurriedly stuffing them into my giant hoard bear.
Dorrit's got a rad unicorn sweater, though. And she only wanted to keep something of her mother's. Dorrit, who will some day be stuffing teddy bears full of cocaine, tells Carrie off. Then, Carrie decorates the purse with nail polish until it's totally scatter-paint cool and has her name on it. A non-Madonna cover of "Material Girl" plays. Ughhhh this purse is such a metaphor.
Carrie is ready to work in the law firm, in the midst of sketchy 1980s New York. Predictably, Carrie gets bumped while waxing poetic about New York. Her nylons rip and she goes to her first day of work bare-legged. After getting set up with some busy work (Busy Work: for 1980s Interns and girls on The Hills), the law firm lady suggests Carrie get some new stockings on her break at a place called Century 21. I hope "stockings" is code for cocaine and they're just using Carrie as a courier.
Carrie goes to Century 21 and, as with everything, she is in awe. My god, there is so much narration. She must have learned how to edit her inner monologue later on in her 20s. Because racism is still alive and well today, a black woman walks up to Carrie, exclaiming about her bag, and Carrie pushes her away forcefully. But, silly Carrie, the black woman is British and therefore harmless/not a mugger. She's also from Doctor Who, I'm told, but '80s Carrie doesn't know about TV.
British black woman tells Carrie she wants to "shoot" her bag, and Carrie still thinks she might be armed. But no, she works for Interview magazine and she meant it like shoot a picture. Her name is Larissa and she is totally not a mugger, she is like, the coolest. This show is, regrettably, not at all like Damages, but I keep wanting it to be. [Note: On the bright side, it's a carbon copy of Jane By Design! -- Rachel.]
Larissa is knowledgeable and fashion-forward and confident and so city. Oh, she's also a shoplifter, and gets Carrie to help her steal an outfit, so she's not totally British. Larissa invites Carrie to a party that night, and zoiks, it's the same night as the dance.
Everything's coming up Carrie already, as she learns through a rule-breaking personal phone call at work that Sebastian called The Mouse for her number. Ahh, to be a child or to be an adult? Sandra Dee or Sandy-at-the-end-of-Grease?
The stodgy legal boss lady, who is obviously a square and nothing more, delivers a dress. It's from Larissa, so it's probably stolen. Carrie tells the one-dimensional Old Maid that it's from her dad to wear to the school dance, getting even more entangled in this web of lies. The Old Maid reminds us that it's the '80s, by referencing early Madonna as "that singer who takes the Lord's name in vain," and tells Carrie she would never wear it. They literally just met.
Carrie hails a cab, wondering inside her egoic self where it would take her. To the dance to possibly French-kiss Sebastian? Or to a party filled with cocaine and sexual deviants? I wonder if there's any possible way this could turn into a Mrs. Doubtfire scenario, but there aren't enough outfits or personas yet.
Now we get to the stuff the previews haven't shown us. Carrie chooses the party, and immediately meets a group of ethnically diverse people who are probably "crashing on a friend's couch just for now, until I sell one of my pieces."
Meanwhile, at the dance, "Footloose" is playing and Donna LeDonna is gunning for Sebastian. Carrie's new friends are just a little too citified for her, and Carrie can't get a hold of her family at home. Because of Dorrit. At home in Loserville, The Mouse finds out that Seth hit it and quit it. Then, Carrie meets some gay people, and they hint strongly at what we already know: her closeted gay friend is gay. It's almost midnight, and this has as much significance to these gay men of the city as it does to 16-year-old Carrie.
Carrie leaves with one final meaningful glance at the party, and narrates about losing her virginity, her innocence, to "Man-hattan." I nearly turned the TV off with an exaggerated click. Carrie meets her "not gay" friend at the train station and they share stories of their evenings. He shares that Donna LeDonna is after Sebastian, who happens to be in a little red sports car in the train station parking lot. Like, just parked right there in their path. They're smoking together and with very little drama/dialogue, Carrie comes out on top. After all, she has a new man pun now.
Walking back, there are police cars outside Carrie's house. She runs back to explain but no, it's Dorrit. Dorito has gone missing. It hasn't been 24 hours yet but maybe '80s cops don't care about that. Solving Dorrit's murder is another turn I'd love to see this show take, but Dorrit shows up alive and unscathed the morning before that plot point even has time to set in.
Dorrit and Carrie exchange some half-assed "you're not my mom," sisterly dialogue and Carrie retreats to her room. Dad steps in for another Danny Tanner heart-to-heart. He acknowledges that his wife is dead, and then grounds Carrie for coming in an hour past curfew. Never mind the dress or the smell of booze or anything. It's all about curfew.
The Mouse comes over to lament to Carrie that she was used by Seth for sex. The only character whose name I know, we'll never see. To the updated cover of "Girls Wanna Have Fun," the Bradshaw family goes through dead mom's closet. Dorrit, who has gotten all the fun rebelliousness out of her system, gets the coveted green dress. Mouse is sad about losing her virginity, Gay Friend is obviously gay, Slutty Friend is Frenching a cop. So on and so forth.
Sebastian meets up with Carrie at the pool and still isn't Chord Overstreet. For whatever reason The Jens are at the pool, and agree that Donna LeDonna will be so pissed. Most importantly, Carrie starts her titular Diaries. She finally walks through New York in a dress that is too sparkly for us to discern whether or not this is a dream, but this is certainly nowhere close to reality.