‘The Carrie Diaries’ season 2 video: Check out Carrie Bradshaw, Samantha Jones in new trailer

“The Carrie Diaries” returns to The CW on Friday night, but before you get to that and settle back into the world of Carrie Bradshaw again, why not check out the new, extended trailer from the network? There may be bits and pieces of this that you have seen before, but this is the most new footage that has been released to date.

Let’s start here by talking about what the show has done well: Given a slightly different twist on the Carrie character. We made a big stink most of last year about how this show was not canon to the “Sex and the City” history already established for the Carrie character, and why they made a big blunder in advertising it as a prequel if that was the case. We’re going to try to cool our jets a little bit now when it comes to that, mostly because we’re going to pretend that the show never did that. Instead, this is the new “Arrow”: A show with a generous amount of source material that can take liberties here and there. It’s going to have to since this is not a channel for adult viewers like HBO.

So with that in mind, the trailer is at least pretty entertaining, and shows off how Carrie is really starting to blossom and find her way in the Big Apple. From one vantage point, AnnaSophia Robb’s character meeting Samantha Jones (Lindsey Gort) is a thrill; however, at the same time we do question whether or not this is just an impersonation of the Kim Cattrall version or an independent character. That is something that it will take time to figure out since the “Sex and the City” Samantha was much deeper than you got from her little superficial jabs about men and sex. It took time for her various layers to be revealed.

The major challenge away from Samantha is trying to figure out where the viewers will come from. Young audiences are not generally taken with Friday-night TV, and the ratings weren’t very good this past spring. The only hope the show has is if it proves that earlier this year was a fluke brought on by competition, or that people have caught up over the summer. It’s not a bad show; it’s just one with terribly high expectations.

You can catch some more scoop on the premiere Friday here, at least in the form of how Samantha and Carrie are going to meet and get along at first.

Photo: The CW