“So what are we going to do?” Carrie Bradshaw once asked in an episode of “Sex and the City”. “Sitting around bars, sipping Cosmos and sleeping with strangers when we’re 80?”
We are dangerously close to knowing the answer to that question.
As part of HBO Max’s self-centered campaign for streaming, the service has just announced that the comedy series, which ran from 1998 to 2004, will return in 10 new episodes this year.
Kim Cattrall, 64, who played Samantha and provided most of the show’s sex and jokes, will not be returning. And so we are left with three bitter and tense wives, two of whom have children: Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker, 55), Miranda (aspiring governor Cynthia Nixon, 54) and Charlotte (Kristin Davis, 55).
Why does “Sex and the City,” one of the most famous depictions of New York life ever filmed, continue to demean itself by refusing to acknowledge that this relationship is over?
It was bad enough that much of Season 6 was filmed in Paris. Then executive producer Michael Patrick King had to release two heinous films, in 2008 and 2010, that transformed a quartet of intelligent free-thinkers into nymphomaniac cartoons.
In the first disaster on the big screen, Mr. Big gets cold on Carrie’s wedding day and leaves her embarrassed and screaming outside the New York Public Library. She cries for most of the film, flies to Mexico and then hires Jennifer Hudson as an assistant. It was “Sex and the Whiny”.
However, it was “The Godfather” next to “Sex and the City 2.” An assault on good taste, the film begins with a spastic Liza Minnelli playing “Single Ladies” at a gay wedding. The four friends, rejected by unworthy men, fly to Abu Dhabi and are later arrested for obscene behavior. They sneak out of the Muslim country wearing niqabs, burka-like clothes that reveal only a woman’s eyes. The film was denounced as racist, stupid and, worst of all, 2 and a half hours long.
King and Parker must have confused the screams of “snoring!” for more!”
Because that’s what we’re getting – more ridiculous episodes from a show that was once great and that is completely separate from New York today, or 2015 for that matter.
Theirs is a NYC where SushiSamba is still open and putting gold leaf on the sashimi. Where the Upper East Side is considered the neighborhood of dreams for a single 35-year-old fashionista and her collection of designer high-heeled shoes. Where the streets are paved with cupcakes, there are no Instagram influencers and a picture of a sex columnist dressed in a tutu (to, sigh, a newspaper!) Is thrown on a bus.
What about the pandemic? Will Carrie ask Pastis to go while Miranda has Zoom meetings? Save us from that thought.
Programs like “Search Party” and “The Bold Type” capture the city and its annoying young fighters better than “Sex and the City” now.
This is not an excavation. Reliving other TV series created in New York such as “Seinfeld” and “The Odd Couple” would also be a bad idea. They are still appreciated today because they have incorporated a specific time and place that we like to remember. “Sex and the City” was an innovative show with layered characters and lively humor – and a vital billboard after 9/11 for New York.
We had a good run, Carrie, but I don’t like you anymore.