Just Like That... I’ll be tuning in
WITH GREAT fanfare it was announced that Sex And The City is to be rebooted for a new series. Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon and Kristin Davis are all signed up but Kim Cattrall will not be returning as sex-mad Samantha.
The story of the thirtysomething female friends navigating New York society at the turn of the century was based on Candace Bushnell’s bestseller and in its trite, shallow and delightfully entertaining way defined an era. The heels were high, the cocktails were clinky, and the problems were strictly “first world”.
Will a new series – called And Just Like That – work 20 years on? There are grim predictions that the cast, now in their 50s, will be talking about the menopause rather than Manolos.
Meanwhile, at my place, we’re watching the eighth and final series of the French cop drama Spiral. We’re also revisiting the first season which dates from – gosh! – 2005. Caroline Proust, who plays Commander Berthaud, looks ridiculously girlish in those early episodes. Then we flip back to the final series and see her as she is now at 53. Still ridiculously beautiful of course, but with more worry lines.
We have all aged with her, as we have aged with the characters in The Archers, which celebrated its 70th birthday recently. It’s an odd thought. When TV and radio were young the concept of long-running shows reflecting the characters’ changing lives was a new one.
Sitcoms – invented first by radio and taken up by TV – found their laughs in the notion that the characters were forever trapped in whatever comic hell had been devised for them. So we knew that Harold Steptoe would never be able to break free from his father Albert in Ray Galton and Alan Simpson’s Steptoe And Son. We knew that Basil Fawlty would be insulting his hotel guests until kingdom come. That’s why the best sitcoms have a limited shelf life. You can only stretch credibility for so long.
Knowing when to pull the plug on a show and when to keep it alive is an art in itself.
Michael Apted, who died earlier this month, worked on the original Seven Up! documentary in 1964, looking at a cross-section of seven-year-old British children. That was intended as a one-off yet 63 Up was screened in 2019 with those children now in their early 60s. Nobody expected the Up films to evolve as a unique and moving social experiment.
Everyone loves familiar characters.that’s why soaps go on for decades. Our lives become entwined with fictional narratives.
So yes I’ll be watching the new Sex And The City, mostly out of nostalgia for less serious times. But more because the thought of seeing what’s become of those Manhattan girls in middle age is irresistible. We’re all growing old together.