With The Carrie Diaries and upcoming series like Bates Motel and Hannibal , TV is embracing the prequel. Here's why that beats the alternative.
1. Prequels fill in the gaps, while reboots mess with the plot.
AnnaSophia Robb plays Carrie Bradshaw in The Carrie Diaries.
Image by The CW
We never learned that much about Carrie's backstory on Sex and the City — and that was OK. But the appeal of The Carrie Diaries is that it takes a story we already know and fills in the details we never got. Instead of scrubbing clean the Sex and the City we know and love (that is, the series and not the films that came after), the new show just enhances it by letting us know what happened before.
Sarah Jessica Parker as the original Carrie in Sex and the City.
Image by HBO
A fresh take is nice, but there's no need to mess with the original. Prequels leave the timelines intact (a few inconsistencies aside), and we don't have to deal with some whole new version of a favorite. The shows become completely separate entities that work as different parts of the same story, instead of overlapping one another. We don't need a fully reinvented Carrie Bradshaw. Speaking of...