I used to love the Sex and the City television series. It started airing just before I left my tiny South African town for big city Stockholm. I was fascinated by the depiction of big city life, and the fashion enthralled me. When I moved to Stockholm I became interested in how the different SATC characters decorated their (often small) apartments. I had moved from a small town with large old houses to Stockholm, where apartments were, in comparison, tiny. I loved seeing how to utilise space. But ultimately it was the fashion I loved. Each character had a different style, and Patricia Field often combined the most unlikely elements to create outfits. SATC gave me loads of tips about accessorising and the use of colour and texture. There was vintage and new and professional and wild. I still have a book I bought where each outfit was analysed. For me, fashion was the main character, closely followed by New York.
The storylines were often not my thing, and there were times the characters really annoyed me. But I loved depiction of working women navigating life and relationships in a big city. Their friendship was imperfect at times but weathered everything. I was rather disappointed that the series signed off by giving each character a traditional happy coupled-up ending. I felt that at least one of them could have been shown as being happily single.
I watched both movies, even the awful second one. And looked forward to And Just Like That, a new series showing three of the SATC characters in their mid-fifties. I am not sure what I feel about it, even three episodes into a second series. I am loving seeing characters that have aged from their thirties to almost sixty. But some of the storylines and new characters have me totally lost.
The fashion is still great, but it is almost exclusively extremely high end. You can see that Patricia Field is not there anymore. The lifestyles are also very high end. There is some bad plastic surgery, a new Mr Big (Ché) and insecure-Carrie (Miranda, who changed character completely). The show runners have tried to diversify and make the show more politically correct by adding new diverse character, but there are now seven disparate storylines without anyone having a close connection to anyone else. There are non-binary characters, a disabled character, and actors with diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds, but there is also a scene where the ageing women ogle a teenage schoolboy (how politically correct is that?). I enjoy watching, but I don’t like many of the storylines and I really miss Samantha.
Can you remember The Golden Girls? I loved that show. I still do. They also had three very different main characters.They seemed so old at the time but they were actually younger than the SATC characters are now. I imagine a SATC/Golden Girls crossover with the three characters from the original SATC series moving in together and having long chats about life, love, work and careers in the new stages of their lives over cheesecake in the kitchen. Maybe a dream sequence?
Has anyone watched the new series? If so, what did you think?
