From cosmopolitans to cringe — how wokeness poisoned Sex and the City

With all of the recent publicity about the Sydney Sweeney ad for American Eagle, something equally important flew under the radar screen: the fact that woke killed Carrie Bradshaw.

Let me try and explain.

While the young, nubile Sweeney became embroiled in the whole “is she Eugenics Barbie,” something I noted in an earlier column, the older, wrinkled, not-exactly-road-kill but definitely overly-ripened-on-the-vine women of Sex and the City were informed that the magic they’d struggled to recapture from the last century (literally) had fizzled out.

The show “And Just Like That,” a sequel to the cultural watershed of the late 90’s and early aughts, was being canceled after three controversial seasons. And no one was surprised, except maybe the actors themselves.

Of course, Sarah Jessica Parker, who inhabited the role of Carrie Bradshaw for the last three decades in TV and subsequent films, knew that the trigger was being pulled, since she is an Executive Producer on the show. But it seems that the other two original cast members, Cynthia Nixon and Kristin Davis were not in on the decision, given the shell-shocked reactions on social media.

But if they were taken by surprise, no other sentient female could have been. What they did to a show that was arguably as important to television’s historical trajectory as That Girl and then Mary Tyler Moore, was nothing less than involuntary manslaughter. I won’t go so far as to accuse them of murder, because I don’t believe the show runners deliberately wanted to put the stake through the heart of a beloved franchise. But in their own way, neglecting the true nature of their characters and the basis for the bonds that they shared while at the same time filling the episodes with cringe-worthy additions like a hostile butch love interest for sexually confused Miranda and a refusing to honorably confront the absence of the spicy heart of the show, Samantha, they starved it. Or better yet, they poisoned it,slowly, methodically, albeit unintentionally.

Whatever happened, they killed it. It flopped. It was so bad that even people like me, who didn’t love the original version, were angry at the post-menopausal carnage.

The first problem was the untimely death of Mr. Big. Chris Noth is used to being written out of shows rather brutally, as happened in his seminal (and my favorite) role as Detective Mike Logan in Law and Order. One minute he was looking Irish Catholic raggedy guy hot, and the next he was punching a congressman, which meant that he was off the show.

“And Just Like That” wasn’t much kinder. There he was, an aging Irish Catholic raggedy hot guy, with some seriously sexy salt and pepper hair, and boom, he has a heart attack and dies. The producers were kind enough to allow him to suffer for a few hours slumped against a wall until his beloved Carrie came home and did absolutely nothing to save his life. No real CPR. No call to 911. Just a long, Carrie-like squeak of anguish, while looking fabulous in designer wear.

And that was the end of Big.

For that reason alone, I decided this was not the show I wanted to watch. That, and the fact that I canceled HBO Max in order to get unlimited Law and Order Mike Logan episodes with a new Hulu subscription. But I followed the show on social media, and in the articles that were invariably written about its increasingly sad devolution.

Carrie, to be honest, stayed pretty much the same. The only thing that changed was her devotion to Big, who went from being the center of her life to a mistake. Aiden, the Almanzo Wilder of the Upper West Side, rode back into her life in Season Two and then crashed and burned in Season Three, but no one who watched the original series really thought he was anything but a Big afterthought. Overall, though, Carrie stayed comfortably the same. Same shoes. Same hair. Same oblong features. Same actual fact, which was lovely to behold. Here we had a woman who allowed herself to actually age. That is the one uplifting part about the sequel: they did not turn Carrie into a Real Housewife.

But Charlotte simply devolved into Charlotte on Steroids, screechy, clingy, annoyingly emotional, and a mother from hell. Everything you hated about Charlotte in the old series came back with a vengeance, and the sweet, endearing pieces of her character disintegrated like the fillers in her cheeks (once she had them taken out.)

Miranda was the worst of all, but then again, hers was the character no one could stand. Brittle, narcissistic, humorless except when she wanted to use the humor to hurt, and ignorant of the great prize she had: Steve. He was far from perfect, but the man loved her. Yes, they had him have a one night fling in the first movie, and for that he was forced to beg absolution for the next two hours, but overall, Steve was a good man who loved Miranda.

Well, Miranda decided that she didn’t love Steve, that she had never truly loved Steve. And then she decided that she probably didn’t love men either. Miranda became a lesbian, and I use the word “became” on purpose. This is not one of those “I was always gay and I just never admitted it to anyone.” The sexual epiphany of Miranda seemed to be like a TikTok trend, something that she picked up as she moved on to a new stage in her life. It wasn’t deep, a part of her. It was the sexual orientation equivalent of Carrie’s prized Jimmy Choos.

Her relationship with the butch lesbian named Che was inauthentic, and only highlighted the fact that she had given up a great deal in leaving Steve.

And Che wasn’t the worst of the filler ladies. There was Seema, the real estate agent who was supposed to be an Indian version of randy Samantha, bedding young men (or at least a young man) with the wrinkles, but without the wry humor of Kim Cattrall. And that’s not the producer’s fault, of course, since Kim didn’t want to come back to the show. But they could have found someone else, instead of pushing a character that had absolutely no chemistry with the other women.

And that’s the sad part of the show. What came so naturally, the attachment between four diverse women, became forced and strained in the revival. The frothy frivolity of the original masked something profound: actual, true love between women of a certain age, of a certain era, at a certain time in their lives.

The reincarnation of Sex in the City fell prey to the idea that relationships are not natural, organic things, and that we all now have to have labels: the gay friend, the minority friend, the friend with abandonment issues, the friend who was born in another country, the friend who hates Trump, the friend who is “With Her,” the friend who has specific pronouns, the friend who had her own Me Too moment, the friend who wasn’t vaccinated, the friend who had a hundred booster shots, the friend, the friend, the friend!

From what I could glean from the show, it was a Mr. Potato Head amalgamation of all of these parts that might look nice separately, but that had no connection to the whole. And when you stuck them altogether, you had something that made you miss the authentic original.

Woke is all about including everything, and everyone, at all times, even when it’s not necessary. Woke is not about empathy. It’s all about appearances. And that is what this show became, all about appearances.

There is nothing wrong with having lots of different sort of friends in your life. Sometimes it enriches it, sometimes, contrary to conventional wisdom, it does not. I have excised some of the people who are so different from me in politics, philosophy, faith and the way they live their lives that nothing about them adds value any longer.

But overall, variety is nice.

Except when the variety is a sop to society’s desperate need to be hip, trendy, updated, and enlightened. The plastic people of “And Just Like That,” and the plasticized versions of the familiar and beloved women that came into our lives a quarter century ago, were a waste of our time.

Good riddance.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and lifelong Philadelphian. @flowerlady61

This article was updated to correct a spelling error.