The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
How I See It
‘Sex and the City’ is the opposite of Covid culture – and just the show we need
Last week, I complained about never being invited to a reunion. And just like that: four old friends suggested getting together again!
Actually, not four. Samantha isn’t going to be there, apparently. Only Carrie, Charlotte and Miranda. But that’s a start. I can’t tell you how excited I’ll be to see their faces again.
You’ve probably guessed I am talking about the iconic women from Sex and the City, epochdefining TV series from the turn of the millennium, which – to the joy of a parched world gasping for sparkle – has just announced a timely relaunch. Last week, a teasy trailer was released showing images of New York City with the caption: “And just like that…”
Why those words? Have they replaced Samantha with Tommy Cooper? I hope not. I don’t think it would be at all appropriate for that tipsy, barrel-chested old wreck to be reimagined as a conjurer.
I joke, of course! We all love gorgeous, wild Samantha! And as a fan who never missed an episode, I’m certainly familiar with Carrie’s catchphrase “And just like that…”, which is the perfect tantalising titbit for a coded trailer – and might be the title for the new series.
I have nothing bad to say about this revival news. I am only pleased. That’s mainly because months and months of relentless warnings, draconian regulations, spiky death figures, dented hopes and ghastly images of everything from crammed ICUs to hungry children’s tomato rationing have left me straightforwardly grateful for anything that seems at all unserious. Thank heavens for light entertainment! Sex and the City is the very opposite of Covid culture: its world is all social interaction, crowded spaces, physical touching, restaurant dining, theatrical openings and rude bodily health; I crave it like a plant craves water.
But also, I adored the light, busy, adventurous and positive spirit of the original series; in my 20s, it was such an antidote to the culture’s otherwise spooky threats about the perils of spinsterism and childlessness. And Sarah Jessica Parker was such a star, such a girl’s girl: quirky, mischievous, jolielaide and with a fashion sense so colourful and creative that even someone like me, with no real interest in that kind of thing at all, found regular joy in it.
I don’t know how anyone’s found the energy to be negative about the comeback. Baroness Brady wrote in her newspaper column that the series feels wrong today because of its outdated attitudes towards cultural appropriation, transgender people and sexual consent, saying “things have moved on, thank God”.
Damn it, I knew the day would come when a Tory peer was more woke than I am. I don’t remember the show being proscriptive at all. It didn’t tell you whether women should or shouldn’t do certain things; it only illustrated whether women did or didn’t do certain things. There was a truth to its portrayal of human nature, regardless of opinion.
These were fictional characters, let’s not forget. From smoking to cheating to questionable sexual scenarios, they did what they did and we were free to think what we liked. Maybe that very notion is what seems outdated in today’s tut-tut world?
This is why I hated that second film they made, the less teasingly named Sex and the City 2, in 2010.
It was so judgy! I’m not surprised Kim Cattrall has refused to come back as Samantha, after the treatment she got in that nasty movie. Her confident, funny, sexually voracious character was humiliated and punished like no woman has been since the great days of the Victorian novel.
Bizarrely, it was set in the United Arab Emirates. The friends raced around in a fleet of Mercedes, shrieking and drooling over suites and shoes like a parody of their former selves. We saw Samantha dropping condoms all over a public street, scrabbling on her knees in the dirt to pick them up. She pulled her knickers down to rub ointment into her vagina in a communal office. Spotting a handsome man in a kaffiyeh, she screamed, “He’s Lawrence of my labia!”
The film appeared to find the women appalling: venal slags the lot of them, the film thought. It was everything the original series was set up to dismantle! It took a position that would be embraced by the sort of people who stand outside abortion clinics with misspelled placards – then, radically, reflected that view in the eyes of the Arabs in the story. Robed, bearded men stared in shock as Samantha crawled in the dirt. Women in niqabs exchanged horrified glances as Samantha clawed her date’s groin in a restaurant.
Thus the film invited its audience to see the grimness of sexually liberated New York women through the eyes of relatable, right-thinking fundamentalist Muslims.
The message must have blown minds in the American redneck community. Whose side to be on?! They staggered out of cinemas in the Midwest, baffled and muttering. That also happened in places where they weren’t baffled and muttering when they went in.
I hope that judgy, binary, illiberal world is not the one we’re all now living in. I think the second film was just lazy; it’s a problem with films, they tend towards large scale and simplistic resolutions. Whereas the greatness of sitcom as a medium (and a sitcom is what Sex and the City was) is that there is never any real resolution; people don’t get out of their situations and they don’t really change. Thus, it’s a truer picture.
Maybe it won’t work now. But maybe it will work: isn’t that the motto of the year?
It’s all dining out, social interaction, rude health; I crave it as a plant craves water