No need to be 'clothesminded' when watching 'The Carrie Diaries'

No need to be 'clothesminded' when watching 'The Carrie Diaries'

Nino Munoz/The CW Network

AnnaSophia Robb captures the 16-year-old Carrie Bradshaw in CW's 'The Carrie Diaries.'

The secret weapon of HBO’s cult hit “Sex and the City” was always the total lack of seriousness with which it took itself.

You’ll do just fine if you keep that in mind while watching “The Carrie Diaries,” the CW’s new prequel to the Carrie Bradshaw story we know.

Because otherwise, you may find yourself wondering exactly why you’re watching a show that careens repeatedly from eye-rolling plot coincidences to melodramatic clichés of teen romance to philosophical voiceovers that sound as if every “i” should be dotted with a heart.

AnnaSophia Robb captures the young Carrie, a 16-year-old girl whose body is trapped in Castleberry, Conn., in the fall of 1984, listening to Madonna on the radio and knowing in her soul that she belongs in New York.

Then one magic coincidental night she gets whisked off to the restaurant Indochine with a bunch of avant-garde Manhattan artists and she knows she was right.

“Maybe it was the realization I had just lost my innocence . . . to Manhattan,” she murmurs on the way back to Connecticut. “I only knew that after tonight I would never be the same.”
Like that?

It gets better.

Wait til you see Carrie and the handsome Sebastian (Austin Butler), with his dangerous male-model bad-boy hair, do their Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey number in the pool.

“My first kiss,” Carrie voiceovers. “I wanted it to last forever.”

In a packed first episode, we learn Carrie’s mother died three months earlier and her dad (Matt Letscher, the dad we all want) still hasn’t touched her closet.

We see Carrie share embryonic sex drama with her girlfriends. Key phrase: “the hot dog and the keyhole.”

Heck, we even get an embedded promotional plug, for Century  21. Talk about making “Sex and the City” fans feel at home.

We’ve seen all the parts of this story before, and frankly, we’ve seen them told better. But we haven’t seen them told about Carrie Bradshaw before. If this show wants to take us on a tour through all the Mr. Littles, it deserves a shot.

dhinckley@nydailynews.com