Sex and the City Redux [Media Notes 165]

Jake Nevins, The ‘Sex and the City’ Resurgence Has a Secret Ingredient: Contempt, NYTimes, July 9, 2025.

More than two decades later, we are experiencing a “Sex and the City” resurgence. First came the premiere, late in 2021, of a limp postscript of a show called “And Just Like That …,” which is currently trudging through its third season. Then, last year, the original series arrived on Netflix, introducing the show to younger viewers, who took more to its screwball cadence than its bygone sense of glamour. “Sex and the City,” they found, was bizarrely suitable to the tongue-in-cheek conventions of internetspeak, and so the show has lately birthed a whole litany of memes. In almost all of them, the characters are treated as objects of amusement, not aspiration.

One clever joke poked fun at Carrie’s tendency to listen to her friends’ predicaments and then respond with exasperating recapitulations of her own. Charlotte remarks on, say, the earthquake that hit New York City last year. Miranda, always smug, insists that the Richter scale is obsolete, while Samantha, always horny, wisecracks about a man who made her walls shake. And of course Carrie, whose pick-me solipsism has become a point of fascination for newcomers, declares that “Big is moving to Paris!” — wrenching the conversation back to the emotionally unavailable tycoon who would torture her for years before dying, unceremoniously, of a Peloton-induced heart attack.

This is how we’ve all come to regard the ladies of “Sex and the City,” even those of us for whom they once represented some pinnacle of refinement: They now read like parodies of themselves, characters we regard with a sort of loving derision. It’s a testament not only to the comforting rhythms of the sitcom format but also to this show’s genuine achievements in characterization: No matter how much these women annoy or exasperate us, we know them so intimately that we can always imagine, with a reasonable degree of both accuracy and scorn, how each might react to any given topic.

And this is what makes “And Just Like That …” such a strange and fascinating product: It is a reboot that feels, at times, openly hostile to its own source material and even to the characters themselves. It cannot seem to resist subjecting them to mounting humiliations, either in a clumsy effort to atone for the minor sin of the original’s tone-deafness or, perhaps, because viewers actually want to see beloved characters tormented this way.

From realism to camp:

“Sex and the City” worked, in part, because of these women’s conflicting attitudes toward men, marriage and sex; their brunches could be the site of juicy gossip but also ideological combat. Now they are a monolith: insecure, maladjusted to contemporary mores and, fortunately for them, extravagantly wealthy. Their debates have been pruned back; instead, the show wants to teach them lessons, and it matches them with equally stylish and well-heeled women of color to help them along. The characters are bizarrely estranged from their origins — they register as lab rats in a sadistic experiment with camp and caricature.

This season, I couldn’t help but wonder: Why did I still find all of this entertaining, even pleasurable? The show’s writing is meek, its pacing haphazard, its story lines bizarre. Yet it digs in its stilettos until you can no longer resist, remaining compulsively watchable by virtue of sentimentality or schadenfreude or maybe some narcotic combination of them both.

Perhaps this is where the show was headed all along. Early seasons of “Sex and the City” aimed to be shrewd and realistically adult; the ladies still drank in dive bars and ate hot dogs at Yankees games, following HBO’s tradition of sexy naturalism. But along the way, the show moved from vérité to very Vogue: It grew sillier, more luxurious and fantastical. By the time the second “Sex and the City” movie was sending these characters on a first-class flight to a fictional Abu Dhabi, the franchise seemed to have dispensed with any pretense of realism whatsoever and gone full camp. And now, as the characters negotiate the indignities visited upon them by the revival, it’s as though they’ve crossed over into something else entirely — some kind of beyond-camp puppet state that feels hypnotically watchable.

I've got some notes about Sex and the City in this post: The Seven Year Itch, Mad Men, Sex and the City [Media Notes 117].