Sex & the city

[LilyAnn13]

Is there anything about SATC that irritates you?
For me, it's how patronising Carrie can be. E.g. when she kept on telling Burger how good his book was and what a great writer he was, after he lost a book deal.
Shut up Carrie! You're only making it worse!! 🙀

I didn’t really like any of them.

And I really didn’t like Big. Just piss off.

I think I liked burger but just because of the actor- yes I don’t think they were a match!

Loved SATC when it was originally on (I am the same age as the characters) but HATED the way Miranda and Carrie always talk with their mouth open while eating and waving their cutlery round for dramatic effect. Gross.

the self- absorption of Carrie was off the charts but it only irked me in so far as I wasn’t sure we were intended to see her as selfish.

i can rewatch SATC over and over while I can barely get through an episode of AJLT

You mean 'The Russian'?
But your post reminds me of the gorgeous French guy she met briefly in a doorway sheltering from the rain.

He was almost as beautiful as Samantha's 'Smith' 😍

It's a series about what these women actually are like, not how they ideally should be. I think this expectation that television should always set a shining example of social selflessness, particularly for women, is getting a bit out of hand

Yes, also hated the talking with the mouth full. It was obviously supposed to be endearing on Carrie, she did it Every. Single. Time. From posh dinners with Big to street Pizza's with Miranda.
So annoying.
Also, all the kissing with every guy she went out with - especially Aiden.
Every scene was punctuated with full on unsolicited snogs. It was tedious.
Charlotte's face licker situation was hysterical though 😂

I think my favourite of Carrie's hook-ups was a very young Timothy Olyphant with his scungy apartment and his crazy dream about giant hands

I loved it when first broadcast and then had started to look at some of it a bit askance. And then AJLT came along, and now whenever I see a SATC episode I’m caught again by the energy and humour and (yes) imperfections of the characters. It was so new to see women in such a very sexual context - the amount of editorial about it at the time! - and fucking up and eating with their mouths full. Whereas AJLT is trying to ‘atone’ for all that and as a result is inauthentic and dire.

Quite. There doesn’t seem to be many posts saying “I love Breaking Bad but why does Walter White have to sell so many drugs 😔?”

The best and most attractive man in SaTC is Harry - I will brook no argument about this *bangs gavel

It’s Berger

'I think this expectation that television should always set a shining example of social selflessness, particularly for women, is getting a bit out of hand'

I know what you mean. I've been watching 'Girls' - those characters are consistently jaw-droppingly selfish, entirely self absorbed and possibly even sociopathic in one or two cases. It's a great watch and I'm loving it. I really enjoy difficult and unpleasant characters - on screen, less so in real life! They're complex and interesting

I think the point was that Carrie wasn’t perfect, she made a lot of mistakes, she was selfish at times and this made her relatable to a lot of women in their 20s and 30s.

I love the show for being female focused and a realistic portrayal of a group of imperfect but intelligent friends trying to navigate their lives in the 1990s.

Lena Dunham has a new series out, set in London. I think it's called "Too Much". It's on my To Watch list, because, as you say, Girls was also groundbreaking in showing the messiness of being a twentysomething woman.

Yes!

'Lena Dunham has a new series out, set in London. I think it's called "Too Much".'

The reviews are not good sadly - apparently it's nowhere near as well-written or interesting as Girls

Oh well! I'll still give it a go.

Anyway, during the course of this thread, it's been announced that And Just Like That has been cancelled. I've only seen clips, it just didn't seem right so I didn't watch it.

I much prefer to think of the series as having ended with the end of the first film, personally.

Miranda said to Carrie it hurt to hold the phone so that's why she may have hung up. I agree it wasn't an unreasonable thing to send over Aidan, but an empathetic and less self-absorbed friend would have first called Miranda to ask her if it was OK. Carrie being Carrie, she goes to see Miranda the following day to cheer her up, but this is just an excuse so she can moan to someone about Aidan.

Carrie "I spent $40,000 on shoes and have no security" Bradshaw guilt-tripped Charlotte into lending her the money via the ring. She trod all over Charlotte's boundaries when she threw a tantrum about Charlotte not offering to lend the money, because it always had to be Carrie's way and Carrie had so self-awareness about how she shit she was with money.

Unrealistic timelines and behaviour for their ages. In Sex And The City they were all late 30s, early 40s, living the life of women in their 20s. And in And Just Like That some of them are 60 ish with young teenage kids. Charlotte's friends who are meant to be in their 30s are immature idiots when in real life most people don't act that way. I know everyone has their own timelines in life but it's made out like it's the norm and it's not.

No they weren’t. They were early 30s at the start of the show and late 30s by the end of the show. With the exception of Samantha who was late 30s at the start and mid-40s by the last season.

They were also not living the life of twentysomethings for NYC. In big cities, it’s people in their 30s who can afford to live on their own in a nice, central neighbourhood (all the characters lived solo in nice areas of Manhattan) and go to nice restaurants and cocktail bars and spend frivolously on clothes and shoes. It may not be the norm everywhere but it’s certainly the norm among the demographic of professional women in major cities like London, NYC, SF, etc

Yes, everyone I knew who rented an apartment in Manhattan lived in a box the size of my sitting room and quite often shared it with a roommate. It's unashamedly a programme about very wealthy single women in their 30s in 1990s Manhattan. Carrie is the most cash-poor but that's because she blows all of her money on high fashion. There was no objective reason for her to be short of money to buy an apartment and I think that was the whole point of that episode.

Patricia Field said in an interview that she saw Carrie as something of an ‘It Girl’ and therefore would have items gifted by designers.
I don’t buy it though, we never saw any evidence of it and she was often pictured shopping.

Ahhhhh I love SATC
I dont get why people get annoyed when characters have flaws. We all have flaws, are selfish, behave like dickheads from time to time. Ive been watching some episodes and one that i remember having an impact on me at the time is where a guy is pressuring Carrie to pee on him, and she as a character is allowed to say "ew no". In today's "be kind" world women are expected to "respect a kink" but it was important to 14 year old me to hear that if a man asked me to do something I am uncomfortable with, i am allowed to not want to even consider it.

I hated both movies so anything post the last episode does not exist in my head.

Also whenever I go to NYC I stay in the meat packing district as it seemed to cool to me in 1998 🤣🤣🤣

I feel like I need a rewatch

I think it's in breadcrumbs rather than obvious moments - she gets invited to openings and premieres of things (not just by Samantha), she gets invited to fashion shows, she knows people who know people (which was very It girl - has all the right connections to people in showbiz and finance without necessarily having a place in either world)...

Rewatching (as I have done many times 😆 ) I find Carrie the hardest character to like. Samantha was always my favourite, Charlotte was quite sweet a lot of the time but properly wet, Miranda was frequently a neurotic pain in the arse, but somehow they work together. And I think previous posters are right, none of the characters are perfect which is actually a really nice change of pace from a lot of holier-than-thou TV casts full of terribly worthy types. Carrie had awful taste in men 🤣 Awful. They did a nice job of developing Big's character over the years to make him less objectionable though.