Samantha And Larissa: Best Frenemies

If The Carrie Diaries lasts for many more seasons — and I really hope it does, because it's charming and adorable — one challenge it may face is explaining how all the friends of Carrie's youth didn't just fall away but were never even mentioned once she'd grown into adulthood/Sex & The City. Of course, the notion that Carrie would have been forced to end half a dozen friendships was harder to imagine before this season's introduction of Samantha Jones: given the way she's already clashing with Carrie's mentor, Larissa, it's not such a stretch to assume that Samantha might systematically drive away not just Larissa but all of Carrie's friends.

I'm kidding, kind of. But it is true that Samantha has almost nothing in common with Carrie's friends in Manhattan or Castlebury. Not only doesn't she come from money: her humble Florida beginnings place her outside the middle class all of Carrie's Connecticut friends (other than Sebastian) belong. She's on her own and technically an adult, but, unlike Bennet and Larissa, still not sure of her life's purpose, and drifting through a series of odd jobs, most of which she lands on the basis of her looks. But if Larissa is showing Carrie how to live the elegant/outrageous life of a well-connected New York artist, Samantha is teaching her something just as valuable with regard to New York living: the art of survival. It's a lesson Carrie will forget later in life when she's spending her rent money on shoes and failing to back up her hard drive, but still.

Despite the differences between her and the rest of Carrie's friends, Samantha has actually integrated pretty well with Carrie's friends...except Larissa. Since the two met, they've been at each other's throats throughout almost every minute they spend together, with Samantha finding tiresome Larissa's pretentious and status-consciousness, while Larissa disdains Samantha as low-class and skanky.

But, as with all legendary antagonists in classical literature, the clashes between Samantha and Larissa arise not because of their differences but because of their similarities. In this case, what Larissa and Samantha have in common is that they both like sex: sexual attention, sex with lots of partners, a general sense of sexual adventure. An earlier episode this season found Larissa enlisting Samantha's participation in a ménage à trois for herself and her (now-)fiancé Harlan that, due to unforeseen circumstances, ended up as a twosome between Samantha and Larissa, so now we know another kind of sex they like is sex with each other. And while you might think this happy experience would have smoothed over their frenemy relationship, the latest episode finds them scrapping again — this time, when Samantha's Lady Godiva routine at gay bar Boy goes over too well for Larissa's liking, and Larissa gets violently jealous; fortunately, their beef is squashed when Larissa mooches her way into Samantha's gig/onto her horse.

The other thing Larissa and Samantha have in common is, of course, Carrie. And though I don't think the show has ever really spelled it all the way out, their shared misconception about their friendships with her — namely, that friendship is a zero-sum game and that Carrie can't love them both — may stem from the fact that neither Samantha nor Larissa has had that many female friends before, having focused most of their attention on...getting attention from dudes. So I hope that friendship with Carrie will teach both Larissa and Samantha that they don't need to scratch each other's eyes out. And if it doesn't, then I hope they'll remember that the proven way to solve their problems with one another is to take all their clothes off and see what happens next.