UPDATE: ‘The Carrie Diaries’ Now Officially At CW With ‘Gossip Girl’ Producers On Board (original) (raw)

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A month ago we reported that The Carrie Diaries, a TV series project based on Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell’s recent book about Carrie Bradshaw’s high school years, was headed to the CW. That has now become a reality after the project was pitched to the network on Friday and bought in the room. Under the deal, which is being finalized, Warner Bros. TV is producing with Gossip Girl executive producers Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage‘s studio-based Fake Empire banner. Former Sex and the City writer/producer Amy Harris, who is writing for Gossip Girl this season, is penning the adaptation and executive producing with Bushnell, Schwartz, Savage and Len Goldstein. The Carrie Diaries is a young-adult novel that chronicles Carrie’s senior year of high school in a small New England town. Because of its young skew, it was never considered for HBO, which adapted Bushnell’s anthology book Sex and the City into the hugely popular comedy series created by Darren Star and starring Sarah Jessica Parker.

But Warner Bros. TV, which bought the rights to The Carrie Diaries book from Bushnell, reached out to its corporate sibling HBO. During the series’ 6-year run, Bushnell’s characters evolved and their lives took numerous turns. WBTV’s rights deal with HBO, which is now being nailed down, will allow the writers of a The Carrie Diaries series to incorporate characters, traits and developments introduced on the Sex and the City series along with the core source material, Bushnell’s book. As for Star and Parker, neither of them is attached to the new project, at least not for now.