It’s a common thing among New Yorkers to feel like you’ve just missed the city’s greatest era, but I genuinely mourn the fact that I wasn’t a Brooklynite during the original run of Sex and the City on HBO. No less an authority on rom-coms than Mindy Kaling underscored the impact of the show in her first book, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, writing: “Let me take a moment here to stress again just how pervasive the Sex and the City culture was in New York in 2002. You could be an NYU freshman, a Metropolitan Transit Authority worker, or an Orthodox Jewish woman living in a yeshiva: You watched Sex and the City.”
And what, exactly, has my generation of Netflix-addled millennials been handed instead of the SATC culture that Kaling raved about? And Just Like That…, of course, a series that was to the original series what the five million Bring It On sequels were to the first 2000 film. Now that the less-than-perfect reboot is officially ending after three seasons, I’m left wondering just what it was that went so awry. This season in particular has been something of a slog to get through, and I’m a person who used a picture of Carrie Bradshaw as the background of the first computer I ever owned. If I’m only watching out of professional obligation, you know something is wrong.
Carrie may have inspired generations of young women to worship graven images of her clothes, but what I loved about her on the show’s original run was that she wasn’t aspirational, not all the time. Yes, she had the great job and the perfect wardrobe and the cute apartment and the girl squad and the line of men waiting in the wings to date her, but she also got pigeonholed as a sex columnist and couldn’t afford her outfits or apartment and fought with her friends and got dumped and did a million other things that made her feel like an actual person, not just Pinterest fodder.
I don’t doubt that the 50-plus-and-fabulous life of a rich New York widow was an exciting proposition for some (especially mankeeping wives who hate their husbands but will only admit it after two white wines), but modern-day Carrie’s story was also freighted with loss (see: Mr. Big), decades-old baggage (see: eternal loser Aidan), and storylines like disliking the mega-luxe New York City apartments her hot realtor friend showed her. (No offense, but…snore!) Of course Carrie’s life in her 50s was going to look different than it did in her 30s, but it’s been hard to shake my image of our heroine as the ultimate single, unencumbered, footloose-and-fancy-free-in-expensive-Manolos New Yorker who arguably prefigured the West Village girlie. Sure, she flirted a bit with her weird British neighbor, but why didn’t we get to see Carrie really hit the dating market again? I would pay good money to see this woman’s Hinge profile! (Okay, fine, she’d clearly be on Raya, but still.)
There wasn’t a total dearth of sex on And Just Like That… (I appreciate the show’s attempt to find Miranda a queer relationship that actually suited her post-Che, and of course, Seema and the hot landscape artist who doesn’t believe in real deodorant are endgame), but Carrie-style, I can’t help but wonder: Would the show have been more successful if we’d gotten to see a little more of Ms. Bradshaw as we first knew her, instead of having to adapt to her new life as a sad-widow-slash-long-distance-girlfriend to some distracted boy dad?
I’m not suggesting that Carrie needed to remain exactly who she was in the ’90s (perish the thought!), but a little more of her original lovable-flop energy might have served the show well. In any case, rest well, queen, and may choirs of Batsheva-clad angels sing thee to thy rest!
