In a series called Mondo Bullshittio, let’s talk about some of the most glaring hypocrisies and faux pas in pop culture… and all that it affects.
After years of threatening yet another installment to Sex and the City, we briefly thought that we might have been spared from a revival thanks to Kim Cattrall’s very vehement and public refusal to ever be part of the project again. But no, lo and behold, it turns out Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon (perhaps bored after losing her bid for New York governor) and Kristin Davis simply can’t let a sleeping dog lie. Or a dead horse remain unbeaten, if you will.
It comes as a further shock when taking into account just how consistently the show is dredged up to point out how much damage it ultimately did in terms of perpetuating a false idea of TV New York (which is also “real New York,” as the whole town is one giant set for whoever can afford the filming permits). One in which white people reign supreme in a city deemed “the greatest” presumably because it’s “so diverse,” yet in shows like SATC, it’s being presented as the “whitest.” A step in any direction on the streets of NY will immediately dishearten some viewers as they soon learn that white people are the minority.
Whatever narrative tack And Just Like That… (extrapolated from a standard-issue generic voiceover line of Carrie’s) might take, it’s unlikely that ten episodes can compensate for six seasons and two movies of ill-advised casting choices and storyline approaches. Even the one time SATC did decide to “acknowledge race,” it was a horribly botched attempt that positioned one of the Black characters involved as the proverbial Angry Black Woman.
But no matter, this isn’t about “vindicating” the show by “making it” (as if one can simply “will it so”) more relevant to the present conditions–this is about pandering to an already built-in audience that will watch anything with the “brand name” attached (for like any cultural phenomenon, Sex and the City long ago became a brand). Even without the presence of its most beloved character, Samantha Jones. No wonder Nixon was quick to tweet “wistfully” of the confirmed project, “Anything is possible. This is New York.” She didn’t bother to phrase it more accurately: “Anything is possible in New York when you have money and a subpar product to shill.”
Funnily enough, Miranda Hobbes is frequently touted as Sex and the City’s “only redeemable character.” If that were the case, she wouldn’t be part of the “lynch mob” (of three) that comes for Samantha every time they sit down to brunch. And, for all intents and purposes, opt to slut shame her while also getting off vicariously on the “lurid” tales she has to tell, while knowing full well that they themselves will never be that adventurous. Thus, a Sex and the City without Samantha can be described with that weird sound Carrie made in season five’s “Unoriginal Sin” episode, in which she decries of her sex drought, “They’re gonna have to change the name of my column to just ‘… and the City.’ Or they’ll just cancel it.” No, turns out they’ll just revive it despite the material already being on life support, as Sex and the City 2 elucidated.
Whatever plot device they use to address the absence of Samantha, it will of course fall short. Whether she’s “killed off” (as Samantha once confessed to them, “I’m a little older than you”) or replaced by someone more “colorful” (Cattrall did, after all, suggest, “I played it past the finish line and then some, and I loved it. And another actress should play it. Maybe they could make it an African-American Samantha Jones, or a Hispanic Samantha Jones”), nothing can hold a candle to the OG. Samantha was Kim and Kim was Samantha. Their fusion into one makes it impossible for another to compare. And yet, without her character component present, where will any of the caricaturized gay man absurdity come from? Who will actually have anything like interesting “geriatric” sex?
What’s more, while one is all for shattering the glass ceiling when it comes to ageism (particularly as it is waged more frequently against women), the show itself is very much about “a certain time in one’s life.” In short, the Jacqueline Susann novel Laney Berlin (Dana Wheeler-Nicholson) condescendingly described to Charlotte in season one’s “The Baby Shower.” Whatever And Just Like That… is, there’s no denying that it will bear no resemblance to what the entire point of Sex and the City was originally about. Ergo, what’s really the purpose? More money? A chance for redemption in the post-00s climate?
It hardly seems worth it. If Carrie Bradshaw had any sense (and we know she doesn’t), she would be unable to help but wonder: is there anything wrong with letting a story stay put to rest? Of leaving it in the past where it belongs? Evidently so. And all the more because Hollywood (by way of “New York”) is as desperate as ever amid the COVID crisis (just ask Tom Cruise) to ensure a “success” with its projects by defibrillating things that should stay dead.
