Wait, what?

It's true -- this week, the long-threatened "Sex and the City" prequel -- "The Carrie Diaries" -- got a green light from the CW.

Based on Candace Bushnell's successful "Carrie Diaries" and "Summer in the City" novels, the as-yet-uncast series will follow the '80s-era Connecticut high schooler Carrie Bradshaw through her youthful explorations of friendship, romance and the occasional Big Apple adventure. It will be up to producers to determine whether this Carrie will be more like the character in the Bushnell books – a girl with siblings and a doting father – or the character she became through a long-running HBO series and two big-budget movies.

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No Cobb salad for her! She needs a drink!

Who is that shady Bono wannabe who accompanies Mark on the sing-along? And what kind of song is that anyway? None of these questions are answered in the next scene, where Mark is eulogized with an equally terrible number called "Hubris" from the fake "Icarus" musical, which Vulture point out is also a dig at Taymor, since "the programs for 'Turn Off the Dark' included a section about the "hubris" of Arachne."

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But it wasn't just aging wombs that were being counted down on "Sex and the City." As they embarked on their fourth season, the show had definitely found itself a niche in women who both related and longed to live the lives of the lawyer, the writer, the sexpot, and the Connecticut princess in New York. But it was also an HBO show, straddled in a time slot right after "The Sopranos" and before a quirky new dramedy called "Six Feet Under" premiering that spring.  Over the years, these women would struggle to stay relevant; not only in the dog-eat-dog NYC where young waifs ruled supreme, but as television characters whose lives were just a tad more frivolous than the Soprano's or the Fishers'. 

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In response to this "lowest common denominator" mentality, editors over at the satiric women's culture and fashion site The Gloss  created an amazing slide show of how some of history's greatest fiction books would look if they were "chick lit"-ed up. So Hemingway's classic "The Old Man and the Sea" becomes "The Old Man and the C-Word," with the blurb:

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Six and a half years ago, my first and only marriage detonated after only 14 months. My ex-husband, a recovering alcoholic with, it turned out, much bigger mental problems, left in a spectacularly sudden and cruel fashion. He said he'd never been attracted to me, and he told lies about me to his family and friends, and he left. I was lucky, empirically, to get off this easy and only lose a little over three years of my life to the debacle, but the shock of it was deeply traumatic and I was shattered. I was 34.

That winter was one of the wettest in Los Angeles history. It poured and poured, reflecting my own relentless floodgates of pain and confusion. I cried, I screamed, I beat pillows. I found an apartment and moved, and cried and screamed some more. I went to work each morning and spent my days working with foster kids in the inner city, and then I returned to my little apartment and spent the evenings watching the rain and crying.

After a couple of months, I logged into Netflix looking for a critically acclaimed show to help me feel something different -- something better, maybe, or at least more complex -- preferably a show with at least four or five seasons out on DVD and ready for rapid absorption. I found "Sex and the City."

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It's "an experiment in political video remixing" that transforms "the original narrative of Sex and the City into a queer-positive story." The creator, 23-year-old Elisa Kreisinger, was ticked off by the fact that that show "appropriated the language of radical feminist politics only to retell old patriarchal fairy tales of women longing to be loved." So, she appropriated the language of "Sex and the City" to tell a queer fairy tale.

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Early in the week, in the Daily Beast, King penned a love letter to the sequel he wrote, produced and directed, titled "Can a Straight Man Love 'Sex and the City'?" In it, he claimed, "In the past several weeks, a few male reporters have boldly told me they enjoyed the sequel, a break away from the herd mentality." Couldn't have been our own Andrew O'Hehir, who called the movie a "ghastly, gassy, undead franchise-extender." Or A.O. Scott, who said, "The ugly smell of unexamined privilege hangs over this film like the smoke from cheap incense." Or Roger Ebert, who said the characters made his skin crawl? In fact, if there's one thing seemingly universally agreed upon among men, women, gays and straights, it's that trying to bring back to life things better left dead is almost always a disastrous, ugly, brain-eating enterprise. Which makes you, sir, lord of the zombies.

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Part of what made the original HBO show so important was its ability to keep its finger on the pulse: From its relationship dilemmas to its frank sexual talk, the show prided itself on being hip and edgy. The movies, by contrast, are a testament to what happens when people lose touch. They feel insincere, overblown, transparently commercial -- and in the case of the recent sequel, brutally culturally insensitive. But most surprising of all, given the fact that both movies were written and directed by the openly gay Michael Patrick King, is how retrograde they are in their treatment of gayness.

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Certainly Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), one-time center of the SATC universe, seems trapped in a grim, loveless marriage with the erstwhile Mr. Big (Chris Noth). I assume writer-director Michael Patrick King doesn't want this to look as bad as it does, but sometimes actors' faces can't lie the way filmmakers want them to. Parker looks gaunt and haunted, as if Carrie's perennial unhappiness has begun eating her from inside, and Noth plays his married-man role with an ashen, stricken, gut-shot expression, looking as if he's about to pass a kidney stone in every scene.

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But I was defibrillated by the film's detour into Abu Dhabi (really Morocco and studio sets) and what can only be described as an Orientalist's wet dream. After discovering they will visit the Middle East, the ladies whip out hall-of-fame Ali Baba clichés: References to "magic carpet" (a double entendre, naturally), Scheherazade and Jasmine from "Aladdin" come in rapid succession. Upon hearing a stewardess give routine flight instructions in Arabic, Samantha behaves like a wild-eyed child hearing a foreign language for the first time. "I wonder what she’s saying. It sounds so exotic!"

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But a woman who's complicated enough to want more than one thing is a woman who's getting it all wrong, as far as American culture is concerned. Rebecca Traister outlines these messages beautifully in her recent article "Screw Happiness": That career is going to prevent you from having a baby! That baby is going to prevent you from having a career! Juggle a career and a baby and you're destined to be miserable! Those boyfriends just aren't that into you! That husband is only going to leave you! Those children will grow up and resent you, and then they'll move out and leave you all alone -- with a neck that you feel bad about! 

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Liz Lemon is recession America's Carrie Bradshaw.

The frazzled "30 Rock" star, played by series writer and creator Tina Fey, is a heroine for the moment when an entire country feels like it just dumped a gallon of water on the floor while trying to change the office cooler tank (which Lemon did, in Season 4).

The parallels between Lemon and Carrie aren't subtle: Single career women married to Manhattan, forever orbiting a suave, older executive type while searching for love in all the wrong places and remaining the incisive, sarcastic voice of reason among a wacky circle of friends. Fey herself described Liz Lemon as a bumbling version of Carrie in an interview with People magazine last fall.

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Over the last decade, the show has received countless criticism, but it's mostly focused on the girls' expensive habits, and how a writer could never afford Carrie's apartment, let alone her shoes. As a New York writer myself, I was never bothered by these things. Nor did I care about the impossibly steady stream of men. It was fun! Who wants to watch women ordering Thai delivery and wearing slip-on Vans? What did bother me was the artifice that has rarely been spoken about -- the friendships.

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"The Carrie Diaries" doesn't hit stores until late April, but the opening pages debut in the new Teen Vogue, out today. Who, after all, comes as close to the adolescent equivalent of Carrie Bradshaw than a Teen Vogue reader? Perhaps that's why the teaser isn't so much a bit of whimsical nostalgia as a fairly shameless attempt at catching the eye of the "Gossip Girl" generation.

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