The Emancipation Of Maggie

The first season of The Carrie Diaries had one undisputed bad girl: Maggie. She cheated on her nice boyfriend Walt with skeevy older cop Simon; when Walt realized he was gay and they broke up, she fucked around with Sebastian, her best friend's boyfriend. As my esteemed colleague Sarah D. Bunting already noted, Maggie had to reap what she sowed in terms of getting shunned by their mutual friends for her transgression with Sebastian, but that couldn't last, which is great: it means that, this season, we get to enjoy Maggie's reputation rehab.

Fans of quality TV will recognize the path Maggie is following, because the last girl we saw on it was one Tyra Collette. Like Friday Night Lights's Tyra, Maggie started out a dry, sarcastic, school spirit-free underachiever who liked sex and harbored complicated feelings for her nightmare of a family. But Maggie's regrettable hookup with Sebastian seems to represent her hitting-bottom moment: it placed her on the wrong side of a divide with her friends and made her re-evaluate her choices. Because this is, fundamentally, a sunny, sweet show aimed at teenagers, though the dalliance was unfortunate, it hasn't made Maggie untouchable forever: Mouse has not just come around, but has made Maggie's college acceptance her personal mission for the school year (much as FNL's Tami Taylor did for Tyra).

In the way of all bad girls before her, Maggie doesn't take to this help without resistance. She complains to Mouse that spending $200 to apply to the eight colleges Mouse researched for her (they'll accept applicants with Maggie's grades and SAT scores, are in the area, and offer financial aid) because she doesn't want to cut into her shopping funds; when Simon comes sniffing around again, she doesn't shut him down right away; she's rude to Walt on their first day at school. But because she is basically a good kid — and because, since the addition of Samantha Jones to the cast, no bad girl is likely to be badder — Maggie decides she does have a future worth investing in, and that maybe she can see in herself what Mouse sees in her, and that she should shut down Simon to work on her college applications instead.

What I like about the show's conception of Maggie is that it takes her struggles seriously. Castlebury is obviously an affluent community, but from the start, we've known that Maggie's background is not the best. When she and Walt were still dating, she felt unworthy of being with someone who comes from money (and, as I recall, his family didn't do much to reassure her on that front). At home, her parents don't burden her with high expectations — only because they apparently don't have any expectations for her at all. Her vision of her own future as a small selection of potential dead ends has been sad, but understandable. Even in a show like this, which certainly makes no claims to gritty realism, Maggie's bad choices have always made sense; some of them even feel inevitable.

But Maggie has decided she can change! Maggie has hope for the future! Maggie ends the episode filling out college applications with a good old Paper Mate pen! Maggie might even win Carrie back over again in time, but in the meantime, Maggie is choosing to have a good life, and thus is one of the many elements of The Carrie Diaries that should make the viewer feel all warm and happy inside.