The Real Reason Why The "Sex and the City" Reboot Is Bad
And the original will be good forever
When the Sex and the City reboot premiered on HBO Max (yeah, I’m still refusing to call it “Max” because Max is the name of Goofy’s son in A Goofy Movie and literally nothing else) at the end of 2021, over 1.1 million people tuned in to watch.
I was not one of those people.
To call myself a fan of the original show doesn’t feel sincere enough. Between sneaking heavily edited late night reruns on TBS and my high school best friend’s acquisition of the entire DVD boxed set1 the show became a shared language I’ve used to connect with women my age for years, even now.
“It takes half the total time you went out with someone to get over them,” we repeat over and over, through prom disappointments, Tinder dates, and divorces. “This is just like that episode where Carrie / Charlotte / Miranda /and-or Samantha gets a bikini wax in LA / makes out with the gardener / eats the cake out of the trash / tries to have sex with a monk.”
Don’t get me started on that mothereffing post-it.
The four main characters of Sex and the City remain a sort of a self-imposed version of astrology. I identified as a Carrie — the writer famous for her sex column, expensive shoes, and love for cosmopolitans — even when I was a virgin who’d never been to a bar. My friends refer to busy dating times of their lives as their “Samantha Phase,” and qualify their desires for marriage or kids as “so Charlotte.” Every single one of us has admitted we get more like the career-driven cynic-proven-wrong Miranda every year.
If you’ve never seen an episode of Sex and the City, don’t worry. I’ll describe how an episode plays out:
[Everyone sits in a diner. It’s the same diner as always, don’t worry about it.]
Charlotte: “The new guy I’m dating is perfect! He has a trust fund and a house in the Hamptons. Except …”
Miranda: “Except what? He’s so boring you keep falling asleep during dinner?”
Charlotte: “NO! He’s very interesting. It’s just that … he keeps asking me to …”
Samantha: “Fuck with the lights on?”
Carrie: “C’mon sweetie, my eggs are getting cold.”
Charlotte: “Well so are mine!! [pointing to her uterus] I need to have kids before I turn 35. So it doesn’t even matter … that … “
[Everyone leans in.]
Charlotte: “He wants me to wear his balls like a hat!”
[The ladies share looks in various shades of shock, delight, disgust.]
Samantha: “Oh honey, you have to try it. I’m like British royals at weddings — I always wear a hat.”
Carrie: “Yes, she’s a huge fan of the ball cap.”
Miranda: “See, this is why I only date eunuchs. No balls, no problem.”
[Later, Carrie ponders at her computer, writing her column that she gets paid to write.]
Carrie, voiceover: “Mr. Big was my on and off boyfriend for five years and he never once invited me to wear his danglers as a headpiece. So, I couldn’t but wonder … When it comes to matters of the head (and the heart) … Are the balls in our court?”
[Credits roll.]
That example was silly, but Carrie’s ability to find the common threads linking her friends’ (and therefore all of our) problems is what gives the show a depth that pushes it far beyond four unrealistically well-dressed women discussing sex and love over breakfast. Without the pondering voiceover weaving meaning, the show would just be scenes of people walking, answering the phone, and carrying a bunch of shopping bags.
Which brings me to the Sex and the City reboot.
I watched it recently, and I have thoughts.
Because I caught up three years after it came out, I had two seasons of And Just Like That waiting for me to accidentally watch all in one week. Plenty of people have complained about the reboot’s lack of self awareness, next level cringe, and the gaping hole that is Samantha2.
But I think most of the problems have a simple solution: bring back the voiceover.
On paper, And Just Like That is a show I should enjoy. After all, I watched the girls be 34 when I was 14. Now that I’m 34, I want to see how they handle life at 54 so I can begin culling a new vocabulary for my future issues. But without Carrie’s heartfelt search for wisdom connecting all the dots, I feel … well, less wise.
Somehow, the 45-minute long episodes contain more characters but less substance than the original 22-minute ones. There are no aha! moments, no lessons learned, no clever ways to tie all the randomness together.
To the creative team’s credit, they do give a lil salute to Carrie’s voiceover at the end of each episode by including a quick, “And just like that … [insert whatever is happening].” Unfortunately, the first episode ends with Carrie holding the love of her life as he draws his last breath after a surprise heart attack. So, the quip, “And just like that … Big died,” doesn’t have the same clever ring to it as dialogue in the original series.
In season six of (the original) Sex and the City, Carrie moves to Paris with her very romantic but self-centered artist manfriend. Even though she packs loads of cute French outfits that look suspiciously like actual ballgowns, she soon realizes that being alone in a foreign city is way different than being single in New York. In a long montage, she wanders the streets, tries some cafés, starts smoking again. It’s eerily quiet.
Meanwhile, Charlotte visits Carrie’s empty (iconic) NYC apartment and finds the writer’s abandoned laptop left behind.
AHA! That episode feels so silent because Carrie isn’t writing. There’s no illuminating voiceover. Her brain isn’t making sense of the world around her and therefore her time in Paris doesn’t make sense. At one point she steps in dog poop and gets hit over the head by a small child — and there’s no pun?! No purpose?! It’s just … something crummy that happened?!
Viktor Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning, comes to mind:
“What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms.”
Writing, to me, is the truest form of bearing my incapacity to grasp life’s unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms. And I think the same applies to the voiceover in Sex and the City, okay?!
Every time Carrie, “couldn’t help but wonder,” she tried her darndest to sift through stories of bad boyfriends, funky tasting spunk, and stolen baby names in order to find, and more importantly, share meaning.
And if Carrie could find meaning in funky tasting spunk, it suggests we, too, can find meaning in the funkiest tasting bits of our little lives.
That’s what the reboot forgot. There’s so much talk and color and kissing and money and real estate and heels and face lifts and podcasts and kids and dogs, but honestly without a voice of reason, the whole shebang feels meaningless.
Did you watch it? Does any of this resonate with you?
A boxed set that I brought to college and inevitably destroyed, misplacing the color-coded disks for season four and accidentally scratching up the shiny sides of season six. I’m so sorry, Rach!
I’d like to think that Samantha would approve of this joke.
With you 💯💯💯. Also my son’s girlfriend asked me “who is Sarah Jessica Parker?” last night when I was talking about iconic New Yorkers. 😱