The Sex and the City Apology Tour
…and just like that, the brilliant, biting dramedy that helped define early 2000s feminism has been defanged and reduced to a woke-a-thon.
It isn’t the sanctity of the late 90s that makes TV reboots from the era so irksome.
Rather, it is the simple truth that these characters, their narratives, and how they navigated the world, cannot be re-written in a way that preserves their authenticity while also placating America’s current cultural awakening/delirium.
The recent NBC reboot of the much beloved Will and Grace, for example, was so heavy-handed, so didactic in its approach to teaching Gen-Z about the struggles of the elder gays and the perils posed by apathy and right wing policies, that it sacrificed its comedic sensibility for cartoonish politicking. Throughout its 3-season run, the punchlines could be seen coming from a mile away, and the laugh track felt compulsory, rather than indicative of actual humor.
When it came out in 1998, Sex and the City, born out of the same cultural era as Will and Grace, was an outrageously bold, intelligent, and witty show. It was raunchy, sure, but its strength lay in its ability to expertly avoid giving clear cut answers to the scandalous questions it asked: Should all women get married and have children? Should women have abortions? Can women cheat? Must women confess? Should women engage in anal sex? Should women think of the world in terms of what women should be doing? The problem, which wasn’t seen as a problem at the time, was that despite the universality of these topics, the answers were explored almost exclusively through a white and heteronormative lens.
In 2013, New York Magazine’s Emily Nussbaum penned a phenomenal overview of the show, detailing how the characters of Samantha, Carrie, Charlotte, and Miranda all presented various perspectives on second and third wave feminism, and how the show thrived by oscillating between these perspectives, often without picking favorites. It also empowered its characters by adding depth to previously two dimensional female tropes; the first season famously explored whether a woman could enjoy casual sex and not be defined by it.
Each of the show’s four, white, and predominantly heterosexual protagonists faced such contemporary and/or sexy issues in their own way, usually through comical mishaps, and the variety of their experiences allowed the audience to reach their own conclusions. More often than not, Sex and the City was about the vintage notion of agreeing to disagree.
So upon viewing the first five episodes of the problematic reboot, And Just Like That, in which the show presents its new woke politics with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, I needed to ask why this show had embarked upon the most heavy-handed apology tour in television history, and whether this is the best way to reboot a show — any show.
The burden of the show’s newfound awareness is largely placed on the non-binary, non-white, non-heterosexual character Ché. To be fair, the addition of any new LGBTQ character, despite lacking in subtlety on the part of the producers, does offer the series some much needed room to grow. Not only would Sex and the City’s philosophy of white womanhood being canonical heavily contradict today’s liberal climate, but the original show’s approach to homosexuality, told primarily through Carrie’s best friend Stanford played beautifully by the late Willie Garson, had also been surface-level.
In the world of Sex and the City, the gays were femme and wore lime-green suits with matching bowler hats, while the lesbians wore black chiffon, bought yonic artworks, and made biting sarcastic remarks, or they simply did not exist. So the inclusion of a non-binary, dominant personality is certainly a smart move in terms of pursuing diversity. But without any meaningful attempt at folding this character into the story, it looks, sounds, and feels, awfully contrived.
The show’s earnest attempt to modernize often comes across as desperate, as its new queer character only exists in scenes that focus on their queerness, and its new black characters (Karen Pittman & Nicole Ari Parker, who often steal the show) exist in scenes that largely focus on their blackness. The one salvageable story arc, in which Charlotte deals with her 12-year-old’s fluid gender identity, also falls short, mainly due to the fact that the child, now self-identifying as Rock, is presented only in the context of their gender-based narrative, as if that is the only character trait the script has time for.
In an attempt to broaden the show’s scope and to inevitably apologize for the narrow framework in which its predecessor dealt with issues of sex, And Just Like That has made a series of choices where the diverse characters have no narrative arcs beyond their otherness. This unfortunately reinforces the tokenization of the other and commits the ultimate faux-pas of hollow virtue signaling.
The premise of the show itself, as one depicting women in their 50s navigating life and sex in the big city, is a welcome one. Considering that historically comedy shows treat any women over the age of 50 as grandmotherly or geriatric-adjacent, it is worth noting that Miranda is the same age as Betty White’s Rose in Golden Girls. That alone should have been enough to make the series pass some kind of obtuse litmus test.
But instead, the reboot also had to make Miranda an out-of-touch white lady who makes assumptions about black women based on their hair styles and is constantly unable to stop herself from making racially insensitive remarks, possibly due to her consumption of expensive wines at 11 in the morning. Ironically this new Miranda is a perfect representation of the show’s writers, tripping over herself in her self-righteous attempt at demonstrating her awareness and allyship. The Karenification of Miranda, for lack of a better term, is one of many bizarre retcons the show appears to have adopted, erasing six seasons and two movies’ worth of character development in favor of pre-emptively placating the Gen-Z critique of Sex and the City. To top it off, the show has a depressed Miranda suddenly doubting her sexual identity and feeling drawn to Ché, so abruptly, so haphazardly, that it shatters the believability of her decade-long arc. It also undermines seasons’ worth of work in the original show that went into establishing Miranda as a strong and successful woman who pursues what she wants and is mistaken for a lesbian because of her confidence and ability to stand up to men. Despite the plausibility of a late sexual awakening for any character, as the most “butch” of the girl group, choosing her to be queer embraces tropes the show had spent much of the early 2000s fighting against.
Ché’s comedy monologue in the third episode, entirely devoid of comedy and full of regurgitated LGBTQ backstory tidbits from a million other shows and films, firmly places And Just Like That in the same didactic place as the Will and Grace reboot. Perhaps this is because a TV show today does not have the luxury to demonstrate its politics over the course of various episodes or even seasons, lest its impatient audience not know where it stands, even before it begins.
HBO seems more interested in having the reboot function as a white feminist apology than preserving the authenticity and legacy of the show’s lore. One can only hope that the show recaptures some of the nuance that made the original a vital piece of television history, before it undercuts its own legacy with its good intentions.
