With the final episode of CW’s teen drama/comedy/ridiculous mess of a show Gossip Girl, the channel had to replace it with something equally as absurd, aimed at the teenage girl demographic.

Enter The Carrie Diaries, a prequel to Sex in the City, set in the 80s and tracking 16-year-old Carrie Bradshaw’s life, love and longing for New York. Sounds as frivolous and devoid of substance as anything airing on CW, right? Well, yes, but that doesn’t mean that The Carrie Diaries doesn’t have some plus sides as well. The main one of those being that it is fun. Much like its predecessor, maybe even more so, The Carrie Diaries never claims to reveal the grand truths about life or love, it’s just tracking the sometimes shallow, often silly life of a privileged teenager in the 80s. And yes, that same story may have been tackled more times than we’d care to count in TV history, but the privileged teenager has never before been Carrie Bradshaw herself, after all.

All in all, if you don’t take it too seriously, this is a good bit of entertainment. And, let’s face it, with lines like “Maybe it was the realization I had just lost my innocence . . . to Manhattan,” said in Carrie’s persistently cheesy voiceover, there is certainly no danger of ever taking this show too seriously.