As a show that gets continually reassessed in a harsh light with every “years later” rewatch, a batch of Gen Zers recently viewing Sex and the City for the first time (as it finally arrived on Netflix) found there to be quite a bit wrong with it (Olivia Rodrigo obviously isn’t one of those Gen Zers, based on her willingness to wear a tank top with the phrase “Carrie Bradshaw AF” on it). More than millennials ever did, that’s for sure. But one thing that can’t be denied about the show is that it offered an eerily accurate prophecy in the form of season three’s “Hot Child in the City” (in addition to providing clear inspo for Rodrigo’s “Obsessed” via “Three’s A Crowd”).
The fifteenth episode of season three aired on September 24, 2000, and marked the first “back in New York” story after Carrie’s (Sarah Jessica Parker) short-lived “L.A. period.” A.k.a. going on a little mini-break with her friends for two episodes’ worth to distance herself from the Big (Chris Noth) plotline. But, in truth, New York was coming across as very L.A. in this Allan Heinberg-penned narrative. Opening on what can be described as a “My Super Sweet 16-ready” (even though that show wouldn’t air for five more years) kind of girl named Jenny Brier (Kat Dennings, in her first onscreen role) telling Samantha what she expects for her bat mitzvah, Heinberg sets the stage for an episode that will be filled with the motif of teenagers acting much too mature for their age and adults acting much too immature for their age. In other words, it’s the plot of present-day millennials and Gen Zers as the latter not only seeks to look older, but actually achieves the effect a little too well. And all thanks to the way-too-early “preventive” measures they take against looking older, which actually ends up having the reverse effect (e.g., excessive skin treatments that damage younger complexions and getting plastic surgery well before it would ever be deemed “necessary”). The result? Millennials’ aesthetic is starting to match their perennially youthful outlook, too.
Well, not so much an “outlook” as a product of being essentially forced into the role of “forever children” thanks to not being able to achieve the same milestones as their forebears. At the top of that list is the erstwhile American dream of being a homeowner. Now, if a millennial is lucky, the best they can hope for is being able to pay rent and still have something leftover from their paycheck. Failing that, there’s always the ever more common trope of living with their parents to save money.
Unless, of course, the millennial in question came up in the world like Jenny Brier, a name-dropping, lip gloss-applying JAP with an affluent restaurateur father. Like Gen Z, this thirteen-year-old millennial was also trying to act far older than her years during her first meeting with Samantha (Kim Cattrall) about working the PR for her bat mitzvah. Soon, she starts listing out her demands for the “after-party” (ones that sound, as mentioned, very L.A.): “Vanity Fair, Carson Daly, People, Teen People, InStyle, NSYNC—” It’s here that Samantha interjects, “Jenny, sweetie, don’t take this the wrong way but…how old are you?” The implication being that she sees before her a girl talking like she’s brokering the deal of the century. In short, a girl who already acts like she’s working a job in PR.
For those who might have assumed Samantha would be “accustomed” to such “precociousness” (read: cunty jadedness) in the “kids of New York” set, let’s not forget that she avoided such “circles” at all costs. And the only reason she doesn’t walk right out on Jenny after she snaps back, “What are you, forty-five?” is because of that old adage: money talks. For, at the moment that Samantha decides the meeting is over—as any millennial of 2024 probably would, too—Jenny is quick to mention that three hundred of her father’s “most powerful friends” will also be in attendance (“The Clintons can’t make it, of course”), concluding,“We’ll be lucky if we can swing this for under a mil.” Samantha quickly changes her tune about being in any way concerned with how old Jenny is trying to come across, instead plastering on a smile and saying, “We’ll never get NSYNC.”
In the next scene, the quartet decides to dine at a place that offers the latest in “Manhattan power lunching”: “haute cafeteria cuisine.” Apparently stricken with the junior high/high school-esque nature of the setting, Carrie, Samantha and Charlotte (Kristin Davis), are all atwitter with the news that Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) is checking out some “boy” across the “cafeteria” who she says checked her out first. Carrie is the one to push the would-be union further by giving “Mr. Cutie McCute” (whose name we’ll soon find out is Lance Bloom [James Villemaire]) Miranda’s number on a slip of paper (back when that was still something people did). All the while, Miranda has been talking about her “tongue-thrusting” problem, and how she has to go to the orthodontist the next day. Cue the inevitable tie-in of youth visiting the “old” because Miranda has to get braces.
But before that plotline develops, Carrie takes a stroll down St. Mark’s Place in the hope that her “shoe guy,” Artie, can fix her “tired old soles” (Gen Z probably also has a harder time dealing with Carrie’s pun-happy nature). To her dismay, she encounters that frequent affliction of New Yorkers: realizing a place they used to really like going to is suddenly gone and has been replaced by something totally different. In this case, a comic book store. Not content to just walk by without figuring out what happened to Artie, Carrie enters the shop, immediately sticking out like a sore thumb. She takes a quick glance around before asking the guy behind the counter where her “shoe guy” went. Wade Adams a.k.a. “Power Lad” (Cane Peterson) replies, “Oh yeah, Artie, he moved back to Williamsburg.” And because this was still 2000, five years before the rezoning law (and, as mentioned before, the premiere of My Super Sweet 16) that would eventually lead to shit like Lululemon being the norm in Williamsburg, Wade adds, for clarification, “Brooklyn, not Colonial.”
Carrie’s own foray into “playing the teenager” begins after agreeing to go on a date with Wade, something he manages to finagle by miraculously getting her address and sending one of his comic book sketches of her as a superhero. Naturally, because it was 2000, she wasn’t at all creeped out. And so, they find themselves on a date at Bar Code in Times Square (a short-lived bar/arcade that closed down not long after the episode aired). The arrival of such milieus in Manhattan signaled the beginning of “novelty”-type businesses that would start to cater to a new breed of young upwardly-mobile professionals (that’s right, yuppies): kidults.
After Sex and the City’s time, Bar Code-inspired businesses would multiply aplenty (indeed, a bar called, what else, Barcade would open in Williamsburg in 2004) to appeal to the newest “it” generation suffering from the most overt case of Peter Pan syndrome ever seen: millennials. But Carrie was a prototype for that form of PPS in “Hot Child in the City,” falling prey to the charms of a man who himself hadn’t fully embraced adulthood by any means. In the 90s, those sort of men would have been called “losers,” but at the dawn of the twenty-first century, a kinder, gentler “epithet” was brewing: “man-child.” And it was starting to become totally acceptable to be a woman-child, too. At least in New York.
So it is that Carrie narrates her date as they decide to play a more intergalactic game involving sitting inside a spaceship, gushing, “Power Lad took me to the furthest reaches of the galaxy…and right back to seventh grade.” And what woman doesn’t relish feeling “like a girl again”? Well, that is, until Carrie realizes that in order to feel and act so young as Wade does (complete with riding a scooter), one must apparently live with their parents. Before Carrie puts that together, though, she asks him naively while on the terrace of “his” Classic Six apartment, “How do you have all this?” This said while marveling at the view and lapping up the cool breeze that makes the 102-degree weather down below feel like a distant memory belonging to some plebeian version of herself that no longer exists. Alas, since, in 2000, it didn’t compute as easily that a thirty-something might still live with their parents, it takes the appearance of Wade’s mother, Mrs. Adams (Anita Gillette), for Carrie to register that of course Wade having this apartment to himself was too good to be true. Accordingly, Samantha demands of Carrie when she tells her about “Power Lad’s” lodging situation the next day, “Not sexy, honey. Dump him immediately.”
As Miranda joins them at Commune, the latest restaurant from “Daddy Brier,” Jenny sends them a bottle of champagne. The “adult” gesture prompts Samantha to marvel, “Do you realize a thirteen-year-old girl just bought us a two-hundred-dollar bottle of Dom Pérignon? You know what I was buying when I was thirteen? Nothing. I couldn’t afford anything. I was serving dilly bars at Dairy Queen [which does sound like more than a slight violation of child labor laws]. Where is she? Where’s that little brat mitzvah beast?” At that instant, as though hearing her “nickname,” Jenny approaches to ask, “So ladies, is everything fabulous?” She has two similarly-dressed friends standing behind her in minion pose, each one of them exemplifying what can now be called “Y2K style.” Indeed, Jenny is the clear “Regina George” of the outfit, with Sapphire Braces (Zoe Lukov) and Blonde Girl #2 (Blythe Auffurth), as they’re billed in the credits, being her respective Gretchen and Karen. And this well before Mean Girls was released in ‘04 (or even its source material, Queen Bees and Wannabes, released in ‘02). Jenny, seeing that Samantha is friends with Carrie, praises her by gushing, “Your column about secret sex? Hello! My life. Seriously. My ex was so completely about the sex when we were alone, but at school in the hallway, I didn’t exist.” Blonde Girl #2 (Blythe Auffurth) chimes in, “And they’re all like that.” Sapphire Braces confirms, “Or worse. Men suck!”
Sapphire Braces Girl then condescends Miranda for having the “old-fashioned” style of braces in that way Gen Z now thinks they innovated in terms of being bitchy/totally belittling anyone who’s older than them. When the thirteen-year-old sophisticates flounce away, Carrie has to double-check: “How old are they?” Samantha reminds, “Thirteen.” “But they sound—” “I know.” “And they’re dressed—” Samantha concludes, “I know. Just like us.”
And so it is that Carrie gets to the fundamental question of her column for the week: “Were Jenny Brier and her friends dressed like thirty-something-year-old women? Or were we trying to look like teenagers?” But it’s a question that now applies to how Gen Z and millennials are acting in 2024. While many speculations about the root of why Gen Z seems and looks so much older stems from their increased levels of anxiety, millennials, too, had plenty of anxiety to contend with during their formative years. But the argument is that because social media wasn’t so pervasive, they were spared the level of intensity that Gen Z has suffered.
Even so, there was a time when millennials, in their teen years, were considered too mature for their own good. An accusation that would quickly get walked back once all the think pieces about their Peter Pan syndrome would come to roost as they started to leave their teenage years. As early as 2004, sociologist Kathleen Shaputis was already labeling the generation as having the “dreaded” syndrome (dreaded, more than anything, because it’s “bad for the economy”). And yet, in 2000, Gen Xer Carrie Bradshaw was marveling at their seeming “adultness” as she commented on her own regression: “One of us was sending over Dom Pérignon while another was tooling around New York on a scooter” (something that, again, has become entirely normalized in the present). She continues in her narration, “When you’re a teenager, all you wanna do is buy beer, but once you hit thirty, all you wanna do is get carded. I wondered, in today’s youth-obsessed culture, are the women of my generation growing into mature, responsible adults? Or are we thirty-four going on thirteen?” On that note, 13 Going On 30 would come out in 2004, just like Mean Girls. Today, the more accurate title would be 30 Going On 13.
Considering that this exploration of the effects of a youth-obsessed culture on thirty-somethings in 2000 was already getting pretty heavy, it was only to be expected that the phenomenon would magnify tenfold once millennials themselves were thrust further into adulthood (now sold with the “coquette look” sanctioned by “elder millennial” Lana Del Rey, who is, ironically, worshiped by ageist Gen Z). As Carrie keeps pursuing her dalliance with Wade, she decides that him living with his parents (though it really just seems like his mom) isn’t so bad after all. As she puts it, “It was like having servants you didn’t have to pay.” A very millennial sentiment ahead of its time.
But when she comprehends how emotionally stunting it is to live that lifestyle (not even being able to smoke pot in your “own” house without the threat of being kicked out), she decides she’s definitely “thirty-four going on thirty-five.” Or at least that’s what she wants the men she dates to be. As for Samantha, who finally makes it to the main bat mitzvah event, she’s further scandalized by the heights of Jenny’s so-called maturity when she overhears her telling her friends, “I’m gonna totally fuck at least three of those five NSYNC guys after the after-party.” Blond Girl #2 responds, “And I heard the other two were gay.” Another girl shrugs, “So? I’d fuck them. I’d fuck them and their gay boyfriends.” Samantha approaches the group, deciding she doesn’t care if she sounds like an “old lady,” she has to say something. Thus, she leads with, “Ladies, aren’t you a little young for that kind of talk?” The teenagers just laugh at her. Samantha stands her ground, declaring, “I’m serious. You have your whole lives to talk that way. You should enjoy being children…at least until you turn fifteen and start having sex.” Jenny balks, “Please. I’ve been giving blow jobs since I’m twelve.”
Considering this was the era when jelly bracelets and their supposedly sexual meaning came into fashion, such casual talk about sex and sex-adjacent acts is no surprise. But Samantha is appalled, asking, “Really?” Blond Girl #2 assures, “It’s the only way to get guys to like you.” Samantha rebuffs, “Oh, honey, that isn’t true.” Jenny shuts her down by putting her palm up toward Samantha’s face and saying, “Ugh, talk to the hand, Grandma.” A phrase that, if used now, would result in Jenny being told the same thing.
Like a millennial trying to engage with a Gen Zer au présent, Samantha is left feeling misunderstood, rejected and generally with that “I’ve been inappropriately touched” feeling. Nonetheless, Carrie describes her sudden revelation with the line, “Samantha realized she’d had something that no amount of money could buy: a childhood.” Yes, just ask Michael Jackson.
While SATC veered into other explorations of adulthood “these days” ultimately being synonymous with teenhood/wanting to retreat back to it (namely, with the season six episode, “Boy, Interrupted”), it was “Hot Child in the City” that spoke most presciently of the Gen Z/millennial “mindset swap.”
And while Carrie might conclude that she’s “thirty-four going on thirty-five,” she insists that, for therapeutic purposes, “Sometimes it’s important to have a thirteen-year-old moment.” Millennials, however, have decided that thirteen-year-old moments should be the rule, not the exception, whereas Gen Z basks in their premature aging processes as many of them assert that they’ll kill themselves before they allow their “aesthetic” to reach forty.
