And Just Like NOT

Time to release the male archetype we as women have been fed through popular culture.

Here’s an unpopular opinion: You bonded with the original Sex & The City. It’s your favorite show. You feel like a New Yorker, the city is “so you” when you watched it. You keep rewatching it year in and year out, that's how “you” it feels to you. You visited New York for a few days, possibly weeks, and you took a picture on Carrie’s steps. The steps are so you. You felt those steps like you belong on this pavement.

And that’s problem #1 of this franchise.

The whole planet associating with the show and its plotlines, while it’s super-specific to one distinct social setting — like no other on this earth: Manhattan. This pavement comes with loads of hardship you have no clue about while watching pretty clothes sashay down the street, on your TV sets.

Every time the people who grew up in New York and lived those plotlines state this, the rest of the world gets offended. We’re not trying to take it away from you. Love it. Enjoy it. But for you, it’s just entertainment.

You had to be living in New York to fully comprehend the essence of SATC. “But I’ve been in New York a few times, I get it fully!”. No, you don’t. Traveling here for 2 weeks, staying with friends in Astoria or Ridgewood, taking a tour down Soho and Empire State doesn’t count. You are not a part of anything, you are a tourist. On the outside.

For us, it was a way of life. Writers on the show made sure they wrote plots of real events that happened to each of them. In New York. Real events that can hardly happen anywhere else; plot lines were created by a city they talked about.

This new reboot? We denounce it. And you can finally have it.

It literally has nothing to do with this space anymore.

SATC premiered on June 6, 1998. I landed in NYC on June 23, 1998. When I feel low or down on my luck, I remind myself — bitch, you were in New York in 1998, what more can you demand out of life? 1998 was the best year in the whole entire existence of humankind. It can’t be put into words.

Starting in 1998, until 2004, every single week you would either walk into a venue to be thrown out because “Sex & The City is shooting a scene”, or you’d have to wrap some event up because “Sex & The City is shooting something”. We’d spend the most amazing night in Tao, to be watching the exact course of events on the next episode, in Tao. We got hit on by some annoying finance guys in Spice Market only to watch the exact same bullshit conversation on some upcoming episode.

You love SATC, but you can’t fully understand the effect or phenomenon of, example — Modelizers, anywhere else on this planet. The city’s obsession with models by men habituating here who would rather date an ugly tall girl than a beautiful short girl was always mind-blowing to me. Some of my male friends at that time had a girl’s height written down next to her name in their phones, and wouldn’t invite anyone below 5'10 to any party. Yes, that was an actual thing in the ’90s, and early ‘00s.

I’m still slightly puzzled by it.

Sex & The City wasn’t a show for us. It was a narration and commentary of our everyday experiences. A precise pulse of the times and the place. A zeitgeist. It was current, smart, poignant, provoking, ballsy.

You’re offended by ‘And Just Like That’?

Imagine how insulted we are.

One of the biggest puzzles of this century is the stubbornness of the SATC creators about making new material. Shitty movies. The absolute abomination of the new reboot. Everyone and their mother, sister, dog, and hamster keeps telling them we don’t want it, yet they keep making it. It comes out, we hate it. They keep making it.

How do you go from being so in touch with the times, in fact — ahead of the times, and all of a sudden so out of touch that the new show looks like the parody of the original one? You have to work exceptionally hard to be this disconnected.

First problem: Samantha.

I’ll let you in on a secret. Most New Yorkers feel Samantha is the foundation of SATC and not Carrie. It was the chatter on the streets since the pilot. The absence of Samantha is why it feels off, for starters. You can sense it in every step, every minute of each episode. It feels like a slow death. The new series is too somber, too glum. The original SATC was a vanity fair of bursting energy attacking all your senses. That thing you’re missing is Samantha’s necessary comic relief. Put Samantha in and remove Carrie; the show would be better.

The infantile dialogue.

“Samantha is no longer with us”, cringe level 147, while continuing to explain her absence in such a condescending way towards the viewer.

Miranda’s ramblings.

A black hairstyle, braids, a Muslim ban; no one with a sound mind can spew that much shit in 2021. The original Miranda would punch this Miranda across the face for this fuckery.

There is absolutely no soul in New York.

They made the most diverse town on the planet so badly versed in race issues and the proper way to communicate about it. Throw in the motherhood speech in episode 4, another cringe-worthy preaching about absolutely fucking nothing at the end of those 15 sentences.

Charlotte running around town.

Trying to find a black person to join Charlotte’s dinner was so offensive and painful to watch, the creators literally need to be sued for that plotline. Isn’t that the absolute OPPOSITE of diversity, and anti-racism? Trying to find a black person for optics? Knocking on a black neighbor’s door, harassing this person to join dinner after she stated 5 times in a row — she can not come.

The creators of ‘And Just Like That’ decided to throw in every single social, racial, and age issue in the pot, just to be there, just to be mentioned, without developing the storylines properly, insulting at least 4 different sets of minorities.

It’s irresponsible.

It’s lazy writing. It’s wanting to make easy money without much sweat.

The world is changed, the world doesn’t care about the runway on the streets of the most fucked in the ass city by a global pandemic. Fashion could carry the show in 1998 and the early 2000s. It can not, in 2021.

Throw in the black people, throw in a white person TALKING to a black person whitesplaining shit instead of just LISTENING. Throw in a nonbinary Podcast host, throw in a kid who doesn’t identify with her sex; these are all very important conversations if you actually created plotlines tackling these problems instead of just listing them. They are not there with a purpose, they are there just to check off all the non-diversity and non-inclusive backlash the series always faced.

It’s so lazy it blows my mind.

Age. This part drove me batshit crazy. Charlotte mentioned she’s 55. Harry mentioned he’s a 58-year-old Jew. Steve mentioned his hearing aid and said he’s an oldtimer. Miranda mentioned she’s 55 on the steps. Big mentioned he’s old. Carrie mentioned her age.

We get it. You motherfuckers are OLD. So by mentioning it 7 million times, that’s supposedly making you look breezy and unbothered? It’ reads the exact OPPOSITE than unbothered.

Why the need?

Going from such a vibrant happy show, full of energy, to this depressed, lazy piece of work that made me want to slit my wrists 5 times, how can you possibly rewatch this show after shooting dailies, if you are a show-runner and think this is good to air? Who ok’d this abomination? They are making 55 sound and look like 86; David Duchovny was 54 and was swinging his dick by the time ‘Californication’ was in the last season, fucked everything on and off the set without a miss in his step — why are we discussing your age 12 times per episode, if you’re supposedly so cool about it?

Harry Goldenblatt is the only light in this monstrosity, as he was in the original show, which only attests to his superior quality as an actor. He looks like he got lost on the way to the supermarket and ended up among this depressing, senseless group. I keep waiting for him to break the 4th wall, say fuck this — and break out in Charlie Runkle!

The Big issues.

Where do I fucking start?

His masturbating and moaning “Oh Carrie, my Carrie” — shortened my life for a few years. Why the fuck would you write a scene where you ask a 67-year-old fart to masturbate in front of you (us)? And these two as a couple are the weirdest odd-looking combo ever put on screen, then and now. I honestly could never understand what all of you saw in this coupling.

Big’s death is the most brilliant plotline in the show. Only one that makes sense. They did not intend it like I’m breaking it down, but the result is the same. It represents the death and the end of that type of guy. That type of guy needs to disappear, pronto, and never ever come back. In character and in real life.

If you were one of those people that liked something Big represented, sorry to be forward, but your feeling was misplaced. I’m glad we came to the full circle.

First of all, Candace Bushnell wrote the character of Mr. Big based on Donald Trump. The New York realtor, cigar and whiskey-guzzling womanizer. He even resembles him in body type. In the original show, he is practically an OG fuckboy, a gaslighter, a messy dinosaur of a man who will invite you to the pool and trick you into coming up to his penthouse and force himself on you.

He always looked like that to me, even before his sexual assault cases came out. I always hated that type of man, ancient, misogynistic — even in the original show.

Guess what, he actually did that in real life ( read here), called a girl up to the pool when he was 50 and she was 25, invited her up in his apt before he lied to have to go up to make a call, then upon her just entering the door, kissed her, pulled her in, bent her over the chair and raped her.

On another occasion, 60 years old, the girl again 25; he invites her to dinner, at a place he knew the kitchen would be closed, and sat her at the bar to have drinks “instead” (go-to move of predators, withhold food for some reason beyond his power, then ply you with alcohol). When she was drunk enough on an empty stomach, the same scenario — “let’s go to my apt I have the best collection of whiskey”, brings her home, kisses her, does not read the body cues she is not willing, bends her again, rapes her.

His text message to her after their encounter shows just how much these ancient predators, like the character he’s based on in the series and private life — have to go. After you force yourself on someone and you know she wasn’t fully consensual, you text her — “sorry about that night if you maybe felt different but we had fun, didn’t we?”.

I will never, ever understand.

Zoe Lister-Jones, one of the other girls that came out accusing him of an assault, put it in words beautifully:

“Chris Noth capitalized on the fantasy that women believed Mr. Big represented. And those fantasies often create environments where emotional confusion thrives. Perhaps Mr. Big’s death is the communal grief we must all face in mourning that fantasy, in releasing that male archetype we as women have been fed through popular culture, and confronting its dark and pervasive underbelly.”

The communal grief.

His death in the show was poetic. The death and the end of this type of man, both in character and in real life. The reboot series and our collective negative sentiment about it is a brilliant showcase of just how much we evolved over the years: we expect more from our television, its characters, and issues it tackles; we expect more from our men, friends, partners, and life.

Looks like the series would use Samantha Jones PR just about now.

Originally published at https://mirandavidak.com on December 26, 2021.

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