Have The Carrie Diaries Turned Carrie Bradshaw Into a Trust Fund Baby?

It is entirely possible that The Carrie Diaries, the Sex and the City prequel everyone seems very prepared to dislike, will deserve all the advance critical enmity it’s been showered with ahead of its Monday premiere on the CW. That’s because, according to Vulture’s Patti Greco, TCD has some serious continuity issues with SATC, most glaring among them that the CW Carrie seems to enjoy a much less hardscrabble adolescence than the HBO Carrie.

Maybe such narrative discrepancies don’t bother you too much because, for instance, you’ve read enough comic books to know that continuity is a hard thing to maintain when a character hangs around for a while. There are, like forty billion different Green Lanterns. Superman died and came back as some asshole who zapped people with static electricity, then changed back into regular Superman because static electric Superman didn’t sell enough comics. Greco, however, sees something a little more troubling in the CW’s gentrifying of single-lady-icon Carrie Bradshaw’s backstory, mainly that a Carrie who grows up in a posh Connecticut town under the aegis of her Danny Tanner-esque single dad probably becomes a much different woman from the one who tells Ron Rifkin that her dad “quit” when she was five:

But let’s assume a girl can have a strong male figure in her life and still grow up to be a sex columnist who falls for men like Big. Even then, there’s something about the Diaries world that doesn’t parallel the world that Sex and the City had us imagine: The new show sets Carrie’s adolescence in upper-crust Connecticut, in a town whose very name, Castlebury, suggests it’s fit for a princess. Her dad wears fancy suits and gets her a sophisticated law-firm internship. Her mom left behind a closetful of fancy clothes and racks of whatever the eighties equivalent of Manolos were (not Keds). SATC, on the other hand, gave you glimpses of a Carrie whose roots seemed much more working-class.

Does it matter that the new Carrie Bradshaw no longer seems very “working class”? Greco thinks yes because old Carrie was relatable and funny, while the grown-up version of new-Carrie would probably be “intolerable.” Sounds like Patti Greco just told The Carrie Diaries to check its privilege.