Can Gen Z Even Handle ‘Sex and the City’?

Ready or not, here they come. Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha are strapping on their Manohlo Blahniks and strutting over to Netflix. As of April 1st, all six seasons of Sex and the City are available on the streaming platform for the first time ever, which means that Netflix’s approximately 260 million subscribers now have the chance to revisit—or, even meet—the famous foursome played by Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon, Kristin Davis, and Kim Cattrall. And oh honey, we’re not entirely sure the masses are ready.

Sex and the City has, of course, not been kept under lock and key since the series aired its finale in 2004. All six seasons have been easily accessible via DVD box sets (remember those?), PG-13 reruns airing in syndication on E!, and, of course, the entire series and both movies (yes, even SATC 2) streaming on Max. Still, Sex and the City on Netflix has the potential to redefine the series. Look, for instance, at Suits—a far less critically acclaimed and popular series—which made a huge splash when it landed on Netflix last summer, even though the series had already been available on Peacock for years. The success of Suits—which broke streaming records for Netflix—was so huge that a new spin-off series, Suits: LA, is currently in the works at NBC. (Sex and the City is steps ahead of Suits in that department. There already is a revival series, the delightfully batty and polarizing And Just Like That, starring three-quarters of the ladies (we miss you, Samantha!), which was recently renewed for a 3rd season on Max.)

Will Sex and the City, a show that’s never really fallen out of the zeitgeist, see a similar resurgence? It’s tough to say, though the show’s new streaming home will likely open the SATC women up to an audience that has, somehow, not yet been exposed to them. According to a quarterly earnings report, approximately 95.8 million people subscribe to Max and Discovery+—a large number, but just a little more than a third of Netflix’s reach..

It’s safe to say that many of these new viewers will be young. The driving force behind Suits’s streaming domination last summer were Zoomers who weren’t old enough to appreciate or enjoy Suits when it originally aired from 2011 to 2019. This same demographic—young adults now attending college classes and making TikToks—would have been even younger during Sex and the City’s heyday,. (An uncomfortable reminder: someone born in 2003, when Sex and the City’s penultimate season aired, can legally order a cosmo this year.)

Will they embrace Sex and the City with the same fervor? I’m not convinced. No offence to Suits, but as a standard legal network procedural, it’s simply an easier show to digest than *Sex and the City—*a frank, unapologetic, groundbreaking series that aired on HBO, and not on the USA network, for a reason.

How will Netflix viewers who lost their minds when Trevor from Love Is Blind secretly had a girlfriend react to the Carrie-Big-Natasha triangle? Will people enjoying The Gentlemen turn off their Netflix autoplay when Samantha Jones starts talking about the guy she slept with who had “the funkiest tasting spunk”? Gen Z allegedly has a more prudish relationship with sex than their elders—a generalization, for sure, but one that data suggests has at least some truth to it—and it’s not hard to believe that the show’s frank and nuanced approach to dating and relationships might be lost on the youth.

Unless a fresh, younger perspective is just what the doctor ordered. Look, for instance, at the enduring power of Girls, the spiritual daughter of SATC that’s long been available to stream in full on Max. Lena Dunham’s seminal series has sparked something of a cottage industry, inspiring popular podcasts like the “HBO Girls Rewatch Podcast” to revisit each episode and unpack it through a Zoomer lens. Girls has such staying power that it’s inspired some Zoomers to wax nostalgic for a 2010s Brooklyn that they never experienced. (It wasn’t all that great, I promise.)

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It’s easy to imagine Sex and the City scratching a similar itch—introducing the youth to a time before social media and smartphones, #MeToo and the pandemic. The show is deeply of its time—for better or worse—and that will undoubtedly spark some discourse among younger viewers. Conversations already abound about the show’s glaring lack of diversity and its sometimes reductive and belittling portrayal of the LGBTQ community; now the millennials making those arguments will have younger adjudicators to take up the baton. Some of this will feel like old news: Michael Patrick King and the Sex and the City creators have made no secret about their attempts to right certain wrongs from the past and address blindspots with And Just LIke That, to varied effect.

But And Just Like That isn’t coming to Netflix—Sex and the City is, with all of its foibles and flaws and triumphs. Classic SATC debates—Big vs Aidan?—will be reinvigorated, and perhaps they’ll inspire new answers. Who really was the worst man on a series chock full of them? (I still think it’s Anthony.) Did Miranda fumble the bag with Skipper? (Some say yes!) Was Berger breaking up with Carrie via Post-It note actually an example of setting boundaries and removing oneself from a toxic situation? (Okay, the answer to that is easy: No.) The sheer amount of “Carrie Bradshaw is the real villain on SATC” Substack essays we may be subjected to is truly staggering to consider.

For what it’s worth, some people have always believed that Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and Samantha represented the four horsewomen of the apocalypse. Now we’ll get to see if Zoomers agree, or go surprisingly hard in the other direction. In other words: Brace yourself for the Carrie Bradshaw inspired Get Ready With Me Tik Toks. They’re coming.