Josh Schwartz is a man who has done more good, and evil, for the teen television genre than most in his short career. The youngest person ever to create and run a network television series, Schwartz cut his teeth on the objectively excellent (at first, at least) Fox series
The OC. Despite acting as an aborted-launch pad for the careers of Micha Barton, and the persistently, inexplicably popular tween-style sensation Rachel Bilson (seriously, she hasn't done anything** for years and teenagers will still buy stuff she wears like she's Selena Gomez), the show still stood out as the best the mid-oughties had to offer in terms of glossy-young-things-with-ridiculous-problems.
Schwartz then teamed up with Stephanie Savage to create
Gossip Girl, a show which has brought me more delight and disappointment than any other. Gradually declining into a tangle of plot twists convoluted to the point of unwatchability, in its heyday, the show was the ultimate of guilty pleasures. Who, I ask you, could say no to raunchy, beautiful youths in a 5th Avenue department store's worth of designer labels doing despicable things to each other with no real consequences at fabulous parties? Those whose hearts are covered in burlap, that's who.
Unfortunately, I suspect as a direct consequence of Schwartz's successes, we've been brought a brace of Young, Rich and Reckless imitators, from the dire
90210 and
Melrose Place reboots, to the somewhat more engaging (and even more flippantly be-weaved)
Pretty Little Liars. Indeed, I would argue that Schwartz's work has been responsible for a class-shift in teen programming, altering the standard setting from middle-to-upper which
Glee alone bucks against.
Now Schwartz is turning his hand to a show which has the potential to be the most brutal violation of a long-dead horse that's ever disgraced the airways:
The Carrie Diaries. Yes, after the terrible decision to sign her rights to the
Sex and the City books away, and marry a ballet dancer, Candice Bushnell wrote a cynical cash-in prequel about Carrie Bradshaw's suburban, middle class existence pre-New York City. I've only read a few pages of the original text, but each paragraph slowly widened a fissure in my soul, my hope for humanity wafting away, vapour-like from the gaping cavern it created.
The CW, which also screens
Gossip Girl (along with a host of other 'guilty pleasure' teen shows), has commissioned a pilot of the reboot from Schwartz and his
Gossip Girl co-producer Savage. No word yet on who is signed on for the titular role, though Blake Lively has been rumoured as a front-runner.
That being said, Schwartz's particular talent is in a dynamite first couple of seasons, which taper into a slow and unsalvageable decline. So perhaps, if the pilot gets pick up, the series will have a strong start. That being said, it may be hard to keep a sense of dramatic suspense when everyone already knows how things end. Also, it might be confusing to see someone known for teenage-levels of whining self-indulgence as an actual teenager. Or maybe it will be a relief?
The Carrie Dairies mark the second pilot of the season for Schwartz and Savage, who have also had an original drama,
Cult ordered from them. The hour-long meta-show is set around another TV series, also named 'Cult', a show with such an intense following its fans are driven to crimes. It sounds excellently terrible, or terribly excellent, as opposed to the SatC prequel, which just has an excellent chance of being terrible.
**Amendment: Just found out Bilson stars in Hart of Dixie, so I guess that's a thing.