When I think of my childhood, and the moments that would have made it difficult for my parents to imagine I was anything other than a latent homosexual, I see myself sitting pretzel-style at the foot of an almond-colored couch while my mother and her three best friends drink martinis and watch “Sex and the City.” I was too taken with the show’s glamour and prurience to register the uncanny dynamic: Here were four cosmopolitan 30-something women, mostly single or divorced, convening to watch television’s foremost avatars of 30-something cosmopolitanism discuss the vagaries of sex and dating. I could not possibly have felt as “seen” by Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte as my mother and her girlfriends probably did — but I did think of these ladies as fairy godmothers of a sort, telegraphing a future where I too might gather over frothy cocktails at trendy Manhattan establishments to debate the merits of bisexuality or golden showers.
More than two decades later, we are experiencing a “Sex and the City” resurgence. First came the premiere, late in 2021, of a limp postscript of a show called “And Just Like That …,” which is currently trudging through its third season. Then, last year, the original series arrived on Netflix, introducing the show to younger viewers, who took more to its screwball cadence than its bygone sense of glamour. “Sex and the City,” they found, was bizarrely suitable to the tongue-in-cheek conventions of internetspeak, and so the show has lately birthed a whole litany of memes. In almost all of them, the characters are treated as objects of amusement, not aspiration.
One clever joke poked fun at Carrie’s tendency to listen to her friends’ predicaments and then respond with exasperating recapitulations of her own. Charlotte remarks on, say, the earthquake that hit New York City last year. Miranda, always smug, insists that the Richter scale is obsolete, while Samantha, always horny, wisecracks about a man who made her walls shake. And of course Carrie, whose pick-me solipsism has become a point of fascination for newcomers, declares that “Big is moving to Paris!” — wrenching the conversation back to the emotionally unavailable tycoon who would torture her for years before dying, unceremoniously, of a Peloton-induced heart attack.
This is how we’ve all come to regard the ladies of “Sex and the City,” even those of us for whom they once represented some pinnacle of refinement: They now read like parodies of themselves, characters we regard with a sort of loving derision. It’s a testament not only to the comforting rhythms of the sitcom format but also to this show’s genuine achievements in characterization: No matter how much these women annoy or exasperate us, we know them so intimately that we can always imagine, with a reasonable degree of both accuracy and scorn, how each might react to any given topic.
And this is what makes “And Just Like That …” such a strange and fascinating product: It is a reboot that feels, at times, openly hostile to its own source material and even to the characters themselves. It cannot seem to resist subjecting them to mounting humiliations, either in a clumsy effort to atone for the minor sin of the original’s tone-deafness or, perhaps, because viewers actually want to see beloved characters tormented this way.
The characters register as lab rats in a sadistic experiment with camp and caricature.
Much to the show’s detriment, Samantha is gone, having left New York for London, taking with her the show’s best sex puns and its spirit of irreverence. But we still have Carrie, Charlotte and Miranda, each looking freshly retrieved from some cryogenic chamber in order to receive her long-overdue education in all the stuff “Sex and the City” got wrong 25 years ago, like racial sensitivity and gender nonconformism. Charlotte, the Connecticut-born WASP and avowed traditionalist, gets off easy: She seems content as an uptown P.T.A. mom. She has been given a nonbinary child, Rock, who exists mostly to deliver scoldings about the dos and don’ts of raising a nonbinary child; she also recently spent an entire episode trying to clear her English bulldog’s name after he was wrongly “canceled” across the Upper East Side for biting.
As for Carrie, she has been made to repent for cheating on her ex-lover Aidan, with whom she is now navigating a long-distance relationship: He helps parent his children in Virginia while she waits patiently in New York, going to the ballet and wearing an impressively large hat. No one, though, has been put through the wringer quite like Miranda, once the group’s brainy cynic and the first to move, courageously, to Brooklyn. Now unbound from her heterosexual marriage, she has found herself, at various points, hanging on the whims of a capricious stand-up comedian, rudely remarking on her Black law professor’s hair and unknowingly taking the virginity of a clingy nun played by Rosie O’Donnell.
“Sex and the City” worked, in part, because of these women’s conflicting attitudes toward men, marriage and sex; their brunches could be the site of juicy gossip but also ideological combat. Now they are a monolith: insecure, maladjusted to contemporary mores and, fortunately for them, extravagantly wealthy. Their debates have been pruned back; instead, the show wants to teach them lessons, and it matches them with equally stylish and well-heeled women of color to help them along. The characters are bizarrely estranged from their origins — they register as lab rats in a sadistic experiment with camp and caricature.
This season, I couldn’t help but wonder: Why did I still find all of this entertaining, even pleasurable? The show’s writing is meek, its pacing haphazard, its story lines bizarre. Yet it digs in its stilettos until you can no longer resist, remaining compulsively watchable by virtue of sentimentality or schadenfreude or maybe some narcotic combination of them both.
Perhaps this is where the show was headed all along. Early seasons of “Sex and the City” aimed to be shrewd and realistically adult; the ladies still drank in dive bars and ate hot dogs at Yankees games, following HBO’s tradition of sexy naturalism. But along the way, the show moved from vérité to very Vogue: It grew sillier, more luxurious and fantastical. By the time the second “Sex and the City” movie was sending these characters on a first-class flight to a fictional Abu Dhabi, the franchise seemed to have dispensed with any pretense of realism whatsoever and gone full camp. And now, as the characters negotiate the indignities visited upon them by the revival, it’s as though they’ve crossed over into something else entirely — some kind of beyond-camp puppet state that feels hypnotically watchable.
This is not merely a case of something being so bad it’s good, like fast food or “Real Housewives,” a franchise I adore even as I feel actively corrupted by it. By taking indelible characters and debasing them, “And Just Like That …” encourages a sort of meta-engagement available to few other programs, putting itself in conversation with its predecessor and, by extension, us. We drop in on the characters’ lives with glee or secondhand embarrassment — laugh with them, then at them, or both at once. We take pleasure in their exploits the same way we might rubberneck at a real-life friend who was constantly mired in some absurd crisis.
Like its predecessor, “And Just Like That …” has been widely pilloried as a sugarcoated dream, a vision of Manhattan as a luxury EPCOT free of poverty or grime (apart from some rats in the backyard of Carrie’s palatial new Gramercy Park townhouse). But look past the money and the designer clothes and you’ll find a show that now actively resists its aspirational ethos — one that baits us to see its characters not as heroines but as fools. Samantha was smart to abscond for London, where you imagine her with a standing appointment at the River Cafe. But she’s missing out on some remarkable stuff.
Jake Nevins is a writer in Brooklyn and the digital editor at Interview Magazine. He has written about books, sports and pop culture for The Times, The New York Review of Books and The Nation.
Source credits for illustration above: Craig Blankenhorn/Max
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