Sex and the City revival is awkward and needlessly catty
The return of Sex and the City, now titled And Just Like That... (Sky Comedy), ended with a death and started with a murder. The murder of Kim Cattrall’s reputation. Before it started, the big question was how the revival was going to explain the absence of Samantha, played by Cattrall, who has not joined after a feud with Sarah Jessica Parker. And the answer is: by sticking the Manolo heel in.
It turns out that Samantha has moved to London because “sexy sirens in their sixties are still viable over there”. Miaow! She no longer returns calls despite the best efforts of the other three (who are all in their fifties; Cattrall is 65). “It’s like she’s dead,” says Miranda. “I thought I was more to her than an ATM,” Carrie sighs. “I always thought the four of us would be friends forever.”
Look, I know people drift apart. It happens. But the idea that Samantha would cut off her three friends because (as claimed here) she was embarrassed about losing a contract to plug Carrie’s books? Come off it. Starting on this sour note feels bitchily off-brand. The key message of Sex and the City wasn’t really female empowerment, but that friends can be your true family.
So RIP Samantha, but what of the rest of the gang when we first meet them again? Well, Carrie (Parker) is happily married to Mr Big (Chris Noth) and still owner of the dressing room of dreams. Charlotte (Kristin Davis) remains a mix of Pollyanna and Park Avenue princess, forcing her daughter to wear Oscar de la Renta. And lawyer Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) is studying for a masters in human rights.
And how does the show tackle the fact that it’s been 17 years since we last saw them on TV? Extremely badly. Not so much the references to ageing, such as the conversations about Miranda letting her hair go grey, but the references to our current woke times.
Miranda ties herself in knots when she mistakes her professor, a black woman with braided hair, for a student. It’s funny, because Miranda is the show’s liberal Leftie and she means well. But then we get to Carrie’s new gig as a podcast contributor, where she’s introduced as “representing cisgender women”.
The host, played by non-binary, queer comedian Sara Ramirez, then introduces herself as “a queer, non-binary Mexican-irish diva” who knows that “no one person can represent all genders and sexual orientations or an entire race and
I fully acknowledge that we are complicated diverse beings here on this wondrous planet striving to be our best self ”.
This all feels hugely awkward, because those of us who’ve watched the series from its beginning are clearly meant to identify with Miranda when she says: “I think I was just so worried about saying the wrong thing in this climate.” Perhaps they’re hoping to bag a younger audience, but why would anyone young want to watch the travails of three fiftysomethings?
The “wokeness” feels tacked on, as do the non-white characters. They’ve been brought in to answer criticism that Sex and the City was too white, but they will always be background noise to the three main stars, plus the others we already know well (Big, Steve and Harry are back as the husbands, while Anthony and Stanford are still here).
The midlife issues do feel rooted in truth: parenting truculent tweens and teens, having a late career change. These scenes serve as a reminder that Sex and the City wasn’t just about sex and fashion; in its later series, the show dealt with infertility, cancer and dementia. It was, though, always a comedy at heart. Now it isn’t.
The death that occurs in the first episode is a big one, and will set the tone for the rest of the series. The reason for the name change, you realise, is that the show is trying to be something else, a drama examining grief and middle age. When Samantha left, she took the jokes with her.
Sex and the City zinged with one-liners. Now, when Miranda sneaks wine into Charlotte’s daughter’s piano recital and defends herself with “I had a rough two hours of school and I’m looking at two hours of teen Mozart
– let it go,” it feels briefly like the old show. Until it’s hinted that Miranda actually has a drink problem.
As for the sex? There’s a lot of talking about it, in a doomed effort to recapture the frankness of the original. But the only person doing it is Miranda’s teenage son, Brady.
I nearly forgot the outfits. Carrie still has clothes that are silly and sublime, albeit a tendency to wear them all at once. Here’s the message of And Just Like That...: in your fifties you can still have fashion. You just can’t have fun.
And Just Like That… ★★