Will The Carrie Diaries connect with viewers? Hard to say since some of the show's target audience was in primary school when the TV series Sex and the City went off the air in 2004.
The pilot episode gets off to a pretty decent start. The Carrie Diaries doesn't re-invent the teen drama, but it does offer a comparatively tame take on the teen years, at least in its pilot episode.
Tonally, Carrie Diaries is much closer to the late Life Unexpected than it is to Gossip Girl, which ended its run last month.
There's a surprising innocence to The Carrie Diaries and its lead character.
Set in 1984 when Carrie Bradshaw (AnnaSophia Robb) is a 16-year-old virgin living in Castlebury, Connecticut, The Carrie Diaries is based on a book by author Candace Bushnell, who also wrote the book Sex and the City was based on.
Carrie Diaries rewrites some of Carrie's past as presented in Sex and the City.
In the original series, Carrie's father abandoned her and her mother and no mention was made of siblings. As The Carrie Diaries begins, Carrie's mother died a few months earlier, leaving Carrie's father (Matt Letscher) to raise Carrie and her younger sister, the rebellious Dorrit (Stefania Owen).
The Carrie Diaries pilot was written by Amy Harris, who was previously a writer on Sex and the City, and executive produced by Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage.
Sex and the City was one of the first shows on TV to make widespread use of diary-style, voiceover narration, a stylistic choice that's been copied regularly ever since. Carrie Diaries can get away with this crutch - telling, not showing - because of its pedigree, I suppose.
"As I watched everyone passing around the news of the day like mono after a homecoming dance, I realised that I was the virus no one wanted to get near, the freak who had lost her mom," Carrie narrates on the first day of the new school year.
Viewers meet her best friends: Super-smart Mouse (Ellen Wong) and Maggie (Katie Findlay), who is dating Walt (Brendan Dooling). Carrie also has a few frenemies, including Donna LaDonna (Chloe Bridges).
And then there's Carrie's proto-Mr. Big: Sebastian Kydd (Austin Butler), a rich kid she bonded with two summers earlier. He's since been kicked out of multiple boarding schools before landing at Carrie's high school.
Carrie Diaries isn't just a high-school-set show. The opening scene, reminiscent of the beginning of Sex and the City, shows Carrie walking down a busy Manhattan footpath. Turns out it's a dream that foreshadows her New York adventures to come when her father snags her an internship with a Manhattan law firm.
It's not glamorous work, but on a break she goes to a department store and runs into a hip style expert for Interview magazine. Larissa (Freema Agyeman) doesn't seem to realise that Carrie is a high-schooler and invites her out to party and meet her boho, chic friends.
It will be interesting to see, as the show goes forward, how it will deal with a few '80s issues. Showing off '80s-era fashion is one thing, but when Carrie meets her first gay guys - and the show foreshadows a coming-out among her peers - you have to wonder if The Carrie Diaries will work the AIDS crisis into its storytelling.
Will The Carrie Diaries be a show of moderate depth, like Sex and the City, or merely a shallow teen soap? Time - and Carrie's ubiquitous narration - will eventually tell the story.
* The Carrie Diaries is on FOX8 starting Tuesday 15th January at 8.30pm.
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