How will Carrie cope in a Covid world?
Love it or hate it, the pandemic is coming to our screens and bookshelves – including the SATC sequel, reports i arts editor Alice Jones
WHEN CARRIE returns to screens in And Just Like That..., the Sex And The City sequel, she’ll be matching her Manolos to her mask. Sarah Jessica Parker has said that coronavirus will ‘obviously be part of the storyline’ in the new show. ‘Because that’s the city [these characters] live in,’ she said. ‘And how has that changed relationships once friends disappear? I have great faith that the writers are going to examine it all.’
It won’t be the only instance of the pandemic seeping into popular culture. Killing Eve’s Jodie Comer will star in Care, set in a Liverpool care home during the crisis, on Channel 4 this summer, while Kenneth Branagh will play Boris Johnson in This Sceptred Isle, a Sky Atlantic drama about the Government’s response to Covid.
On the big screen, Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor star in Locked Down, as a London couple who attempt a daring heist at Harrods during the first lockdown, while Ben Wheatley, who last directed Lily James in Rebecca, sets his new horror In The Earth in the near future during a pandemic.
In books, How To Survive Everything by Ewan Morrison (author of Nina X) follows a teenage girl whose life is upended by a pandemic, while Phoebe Luckhurst’s The Lock-in, about three housemates who get locked in the attic, was inspired by 2020.
This is, in some ways, the second wave of ‘Covid culture’. When lockdown first hit, TV producers scrambled for ways to reflect the moment (and film within restrictions), making heavy use of mobile phones and Zoom in shows such as Staged and Isolation Stories. Now they must decide whether to rewrite scripts to reflect the ‘new normal’, or to ignore it in favour of entertainment that offers a break from reality.
‘This has been our reality for a year so it might be strange if we don’t start seeing it reflected in TV and culture,’ says Hannah J Davies, deputy TV editor of The Guardian. ‘But I don’t think SATC, or any other show, has to go there. That’s a show we watch for their camaraderie, as they go out to do things that we haven’t been able to.’
In hard times, the arts offer an escape. Last month, Britbox overtook Now TV and Apple TV in terms of new subscribers, as audiences rushed to watch archive shows, from a time before social distancing. There is a place for art that reflects the times we are living through, but we can enjoy forgetting about them for half an hour, too.