‘The Carrie Diaries’: Here’s How Carrie Would Have Met Miranda
When The CW saw how much fans loved Sex and the City, they decided to draw fans in with a SATC of their own. Instead of creating a similar show, the network went back to the beginning. In 2013, they picked up The Carrie Diaries, a prequel to the famous HBO hit. The show followed a young Carrie Bradshaw as she grows up, and has the formative experiences that made her the Carrie Bradshaw fans know and love. When SATC premiered, the four best friends had already established relationships. The fun thing about The Carrie Diaries is that fans were going to get a chance to see how those relationships began. Unfortunately, the show ended too soon, and fans never saw how Miranda and Charlotte connected with Carrie.
Carrie would have met Miranda through Mouse
The good news is the show’s creator didn’t want to leave fans hanging. When the show was canceled thanks to lack of viewership, Amy B. Harris gave E! the scoop about how the show would have gone if it had gotten renewed. In Miranda’s case, she would have been Mouse’s Harvard roommate. The Carrie Diaries tells us that before there was Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha, there was Maggie, Mouse, and Walt.
Carrie’s first friend group is very different from her later Sex and the City gang. Maggie is similar to Samantha in her outgoing, larger than life personality, but she isn’t as overtly sexual as Samantha. Mouse is the smart one, which does make her kind of the Miranda of the group. It makes sense that she would be the one to introduce Carrie and Miranda.
That’s not how Miranda and Carrie met in ‘Sex and the City’
The book Summer in the City by Candace Bushnell paints a very different picture of how Miranda and Carrie met. Mouse is apparently not a character at all in the Sex and the City canon. According to Bushnell’s book Miranda and Carrie met while Miranda was protesting outside Saks Fifth Avenue. Fans can totally buy Miranda being an activist, and Carrie happening upon her while shopping.
But interestingly, the movie Sex and the City 2 tells a different story. According to the movie, Carrie and Miranda meet while Carrie is working at Bloomingdale’s. Miranda is crying in the dressing room, and Carrie comforts her. That makes three different ways that Miranda and Carrie may have met, depending on the source. Carrie’s relationship with Samantha also has three possible origins.
Samantha was in ‘The Carrie Diaries,’ going against the original ‘Sex and the City’
In Harris’ version of Carrie Bradshaw’s life, she and Samantha Jones meet while Carrie is in high school, before Carrie moves to New York. At the end of the series, the two are sharing a pad in the Big Apple. According to Harris, that’s what made sense for her version of the show. “I really did feel like Samantha was someone Carrie could have met while she was still in high school.” But that doesn’t quite jive with other versions of Carrie and Samantha’s meeting.
According to the books, Carrie and Samantha meet after Carrie moves to New York. She’s given her number by a high school friend, Samantha’s cousin Donna. The two connect, and become fast friends. In the movie Sex and the City 2, Carrie says that Samantha was a bartender at a popular club, and that’s how they met. While Samantha and Carrie meet under similar circumstances in The Carrie Diaries, it’s clear the characters’ origin stories are all over the map in the Sex and the City world Candace Bushnell created.
