I Just Can't Get Enough

The crazy thing about The Carrie Diaries is that, even though I shouldn't, I like it SO MUCH. For one thing, it is for children -- though, as my frequent writings on Degrassi and Regular Show indicate, suggested age ranges on TV shows are irrelevant to me. But more germane is the fact that I never really liked Sex & The City, which revolved around Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker, in that series) as an adult -- and yet, now that the character is portrayed as a teenager (by AnnaSophia Robb in Diaries), I find her, and the world around her, irresistible.

Perhaps the reason Diaries works so much better, on me, than Sex did is that...well, frankly, I pretend that Little Carrie (LC) and Big Carrie (BC) are two completely different characters. Which is easy to do, because while I had feared Diaries would be loaded with winky references to Sex, it actually isn't. Diaries treats its LC not as a semi-developed, embryonic form of BC, but as a character in her own right, whose concerns it takes seriously -- like all the best teen-focused shows do and should. And, frankly, LC displays more emotional maturity in any given situation than I ever saw from BC in my (admittedly limited) viewing of Sex. LC is warm, sweet, and a great friend to Maggie (Katie Findlay), Mouse (Ellen Wong), and maybe most of all to Walt (Brendan Dooling), of whom more later; she's also tasked with the challenge of holding together her family -- father Tom (Matthew Letscher) and sister Dorrit (Stefania Owen) -- following the untimely death of her mother, which predates the start of the series by just a few months. (Carrie Bradshaw's fashion-obsessed superficiality and carelessness with money, two of her worst qualities, evidently don't develop until later in her life.)

Diaries has a lot of elements typical of teen dramas -- a snotty nemesis in the form of Donna LaDonna (Chloe Bridges), for instance -- and scandalous secrets kept among some friends from some others. But what I like about the show is that neither of those is exaggerated to the point of soapy camp. Though Donna is still basically kind of a dick, producers made her into a person: after trying out dating Walt, she was one of the first characters on the show to figure out that he's gay, and kindly let him stay in the closet rather than gain any social status by outing him. That was one of the scandalous secrets that actually stayed hidden, actually; others, like Donna's demand that Maggie keep Carrie and Sebastian (Austin Butler) apart, or Sebastian and Maggie's sighting of Tom making out with his girlfriend Deb (Nadia Dajani), or Sebastian and Maggie's makeout sesh (and maybe more?) in last night's season finale, have come out almost immediately, which is both good and realistic: teenagers can't keep a lid on that shit in real life, and when they do on TV for contrived story reasons, it never really rings true.

The exception to this rule is Walt's coming-out story, which has unspooled over the course of the entire season despite his sexuality's being extremely obvious to the 2013 viewer since the pilot and before Walt himself even knew. As someone who was part of many high-school drama productions in the early '90s, well after the time Diaries is set, and therefore knew a lot of gay kids before they even fathomed coming out -- Walt's slow and tentative coming-out has rung true to me and has been one of the most compelling and poignant stories of the show thus far. Dooling does a nice job playing Walt's competing motivations -- the desire not to let down the people he loves, particularly his now ex-girlfriend Maggie, and the desire to be himself -- and though Bennet (Jake Wilcox), The First Gay Person Walt Knows, could have slid into caricaturish Gayoda territory (tm Sarah D. Bunting), he has instead just been a good friend to Walt, letting him figure things out at his own pace. His putting a lid on Walt's advances in the finale last night struck me as a network note from an executive concerned that Diaries would get labelled NAMBLA propaganda or some such nonsense, but whatever: assuming that the show comes back, Walt will be eighteen soon enough.

Unfortunately, that is a concern: Diaries is on the bubble. Fortunately, last night's finale showed the season finishing strong (relatively) (for The CW), posting its highest numbers in a month. I can certainly understand why viewers haven't embraced it, if they're viewers like me: the Sex pedigree will be a turnoff for a huge segment of the show's potential audience. But trust me when I say that the show ranks alongside some of the best teen shows in the TV canon -- maybe not as highbrow as My So-Called Life or Freaks And Geeks, but as likable and charming as Greek or Aliens In America. I'm hoping that The CW will grade its ratings on a curve and let The Carrie Diaries run longer than either of those did.