Sex and the City: a blast from the 1990s
With its “Manolos, Fendi baguettes, Rampant Rabbit vibrators, backless dresses and cosmopolitans”, Sex and the City felt “joyous and liberating” when it came out in the late 1990s, said Alice Thomson in The Times. Over 94 episodes and two movies, the hit US series – based on Candace Bushnell’s 1997 book – charted the lives and lusts of four successful New York women: Carrie (played by Sarah Jessica Parker), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), Charlotte (Kristin Davis) and Samantha (Kim Cattrall). Although its plotlines often revolved around “women desperate to find a partner” and “toxic men behaving badly”, it pioneered a refreshingly unapologetic attitude towards sex, shopping, work and relationships that can still be seen in shows such as Fleabag and Killing Eve. Shallow it may have been, but at the time “it felt like progress” to millions. And now it’s back.
More than a decade after its last outing, SATC has just been recommissioned for a new series, said Zoe Williams in The Guardian – with a new name, And Just Like That..., and a new cast (Samantha’s out, because Cattrall has fallen out with Parker). But how will a show created at the apex of the frivolous, debt-laden 1990s play in the glum 2020s? In retrospect, the show’s total lack of diversity looks embarrassing, as does its “gorging consumerism” (one critic called the second film a “terrorist motivational tool”). Even the sex was “intensely commodified”, with men “measured out by their body parts”.
The “fun-suckers” are gathering to take pot shots at the new series, said Janice Turner in The Times. “OMG! Women are having orgasms and mindless fun! Boot up the Problematic-o-tron!” But SATC was never supposed to be a “feminist road map”, or to encompass “every female experience”. It was a “hedonist fantasy reflecting the prelapsarian 1990s”. Men’s escapist TV is never parsed for “wrong-think” in the way that women’s shows are. I do hope the reboot will be allowed to be funny about older women’s lives. By the time Carrie and her friends have been duly punished for being white, rich and old, checking their privilege “as once they checked their coats”, will the new show actually make anyone laugh?