One of the trickiest aspects of HBO’s was the way viewers spent roughly half of the drama’s first season with “younger” versions of our two heroines — Rhaenyra Targaryen and Alicent Hightower — before a time jump brought longer-term stars Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke to the screen. That put a lot of pressure on Milly Alcock and to anchor those initial episodes, which they did extremely well. Alcock had the greater visibility, quickly becoming a red carpet favorite and setting herself up for the opportunity to play Supergirl.
Carey’s first major follow-up, ‘s adaptation of Holly Smale’s coming-of-age series, isn’t as high profile as joining DC’s House of Zor-El, but it’s a solid showcase for its 21-year-old star. is a likably wholesome, generally low-stakes YA fairy tale — references to Cinderella abound — that might even skew too young for the audience, much less something like . And much less an audience that watched .
Though I come to from far outside of any of its core demos and probably would have gravitated toward something with a hair more edge, I appreciated the show’s fast-moving and poppy — heck, it even has a character “Poppy” — sensibility, its warmth and the confidence of Carey’s central performance. Following in the footsteps of similar disingenuously ugly-duckling protagonists in the / vein, Carey’s Harriet Manners is a self-described “geek,” which her frequent voiceovers define in a variety of semi-complimentary w.