You and your friends are like people in reality shows? Yuck.
I’m very much of two minds here. I worked on Sex and The City as a day player Cameraman. I’d done a few episodes before my ex-wife watched it once at a friends’ house.
She came home announcing that we were getting HBO. Oh, she was all in a froth over how great it was.
Meh. The only thing I can say for it is that it was very much like Seinfeld in that it was about very little to nothing. I never got into Seinfeld. I get it. I do. It’s about nothing. Most of everyone’s life is about nothing. You get up and take a shower and get it together and get out the door and onto the subway and then stand at the bus stop waiting for the bus and see other people waiting for the bus and then you do your job or shop for stuff and interact with strangers some of whom are civil and some of whom are uncivil and then you reverse, get home, consume food, eliminate food, sleep. Awaken, repeat and rinse.
Why this made for Emmy-award winning t.v. was always a bit beyond me. Similarly, Sex and The City was about the nothingness of the normal range of human relationships. Did we care about any of them? Not really. Did a lot of women relate very heavily to one or more of the archetypes? Oh holy crap yes. Hence the incredible popularity.
It wasn’t art, in the same way that The Brady Bunch wasn’t art. In fact, one might make the argument that S&TC was the Brady Bunch with a clitoris.
On the OTHER other hand, I can say with firsthand experience that there’s nothing like working on a hit t.v. show. Everyone is energized, everyone brings their A Game and the catering kicks ass. 
I’ve never seen the movies, but really enjoyed the show. One thing that really surprised me about the book (the inspiration for the show) was just how awful it is. It just rambles on about various people nobody would give a shit about. No plot or character development whatsoever. The four main characters in the TV show were just minor characters in the book.
Really? I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to offend anyone in real life.
But that doesn’t mean I didn’t. My apologies to everyone who was.
twickster, check your PM’s when you have a chance. Thanks.
TO Ivory Tower Denizen: No problem here. I enjoy the banter on these message boards. Have a great one.
In SATC, there is only one fully developed character, and that is New York. A narrow slice of New York that lives ambition and trends. Everyone else is a chess piece moving around in the ways that fit with that take on New York.
The first few seasons of the show were really very good. They’ve really gone off the rails now though.
Oh god the show was awful. You can’t even call the show’s main female characters ‘caricatures’- they were card-board cut-outs of caricatures, poorly done at that. Popular trash is still…trash.
I loved the show, though I could never afford to live the affluent lives of any of the principal characters! Perhaps it is because I do not live in NYC that I can still watch reruns of SATC series without finding anything significantly outdated about it.
As for the movies, I liked movie I and not so much movie II, though that was mostly because of poor editing and excessive length. Despite all that, IMO, SATC-II did not deserve the disparaging (and often, frankly misogynist) reviews that it got. I personally think male reviewers often seem to dislike SATC because, (for the first time ?), in a television show, women openly treat men as sex objects. The 4 women discuss men & shoes (and relationships and clothes) with same cold, analytical, and often cynical eye. And no one is selling sex (or anything else) for shoes either. Sexual objectification of women is as old as history, but when women are shown to enjoy being sexual and financially well-off (without using one to fund the other), well, then the shoe on the other foot, and the reaction is… blistering :D, as is to be expected.
So what is wrong with being a slut, if you enjoy it? Given the societal objections against a woman who enjoys sex so much that she has numerous lovers, any popular entertainment show wherein the “slut” does not pay for her indiscretions is a revolutionary one.
There is nothing “cartoon-like” about Sam. She exists in all of us. The show focuses on this one aspect of her personality in order to throw our own prejudices in our faces. We don’t care that she is (also) a successful business woman, that she is real go-getter, or that she speaks her mind and walks out of relationships when they become too stressful for her. Her fans are cheering her on for refusing to be a hypocrite and denying her self her needs, while her detractors are hoping that she will suffer for having slept with one (or 10 or 100) men too many. Isn’t that how society functions as well? No one minds a girl having good time, as long as she does not look like she is enjoying herself (too much), or so the saying goes.
Nothing except that it makes for a boring character if that’s all they’re bringing to the table. You could say the same thing if you replaced “slut” with “religious devotee” (or any number of other things) and feel the same way.
Psst – OP here, and I did indeed find the women to be heinous cunts. I also happen to not be a fella, so I got that going for me. I didn’t watch the show when it was airing, nor did I catch much of the first movie, hence my question of whether they has always been so awful. I thought the dialog was cringe-inducing, and every situation showed these women to be selfish, self-involved and having less depth than a dust mite. Granted, I didn’t last very long at all, only long enough to be really repulsed by the characters. I didn’t go after their looks – they’re women of a certain age, as am I, so it didn’t really enter into my impression. I just really wouldn’t want to spend any time with any of them, ever.
Carry on…
I agree with this.
My wife was a big fan of the series, and it was something I could watch with her and actually enjoy, for the most part. She “dragged” me to the first movie, but I had to admit I kind of enjoyed it too.
About halfway through the sequel, when they all get up and sing karaoke to “I Am Woman,” my wife turned to me in the theater and whispered, “I’m sorry about this.”
To be fair, all the male characters were also two-dimensional caricatures. I didn’t dislike it because it was anti-feminist; I disliked it because ALL the characters were shallow, petty, vain and annoying.
That said, it did at least represent a relatively original voice in television shows when it launched. That it eventually slid into self-parody had much to do with the aforementioned shallow characterization.
And about the movies I will not speak.
The show’s earlier years were fairly sexually daring for the time, at least in my then naive life. I enjoyed the discussions of these ‘taboo’ subjects as did many others. Now, those subjects are openly discussed by middle-aged women in the work lunchroom. Yes, the characters were relatively shallow and one dimensional, but both men and women should give the show a nod for putting some interesting views on sex into the mainstream.
I agree, but it would be perfectly acceptable if the series/movies were titled “religion and the city”, no?
Anyway, for those interested in identifying with the exploration or experience of the full spectrum of human (especially female) sexual behavior, Samantha (admittedly no Anais Nin) is still fascinating. Note that the series was titled “Sex and the city”. It was about women talking about sex, and experiencing sexual gratification. All plots, whether they are about mechanical devices, finding a devoted spouse, playing around with umpteen lovers of any orientation, or about shopping for shoes, eventually explore the gratification of a woman’s libido (which, as we know, lies as much in the head as elsewhere).
One expects that such a series will revolve around female physical desires, in all their glory. It is pointless to complain that the characters have been portrayed incompletely, or rendered in only a few colors. It is meant to be so. One woman seeks her Byronic lover who is “mad, bad and dangerous to know” (an eternal female fantasy), the other wants her picture book romance complete with the full white wedding, and the children, all in right order, thank-you-very-much (her socially approved dream); the 3rd wants a politically correct mate to match her own ideal world view (don’t we all seek the perfect man?); and the 4th wants to satisfy her very physical desires, to-hell-with-any-social-mores-in-the-process (doesn’t every woman want to be that daring at some point in her life?). If each one brings to the table only one or two flavors, it is because the viewer is meant to explore, dissect and analyze each one in all their nuances. No flavor is unreal. In itself, none is incomplete. One may only argue that for connoisseurs of human portraiture, no one flavor comprises a full meal. But then, the series would have been downright boring, if every one of them was portrayed as a complete, n-dimensional character, with all normal problems associated with such a complex human condition. In fact, the characters would start to become trite, and that is one of my problems with SATC II. I felt that both movies needed tighter editing, with crisper plots.
Finally, what galls me most is that many critics, who are so harsh about four 40 to 50 year old women talking about sex and shopping, will not blink an eye about the elderly male protagonists of, say, the Expendables (I & II). The latter ride motor cycles, shoot automated weapons and generally blow up everything around them, without any thought for collateral damage, all at an age when society mandates that they be dandling grandchildren on their knees and reminiscing about the good old days. Both Exp.I and Exp.II are fun movies are watch (and oddly enough, the unbridled masculinity is hot! ;)), though the characters are all 1-d as in SATC. But if the point of the Expendables is that age is not a barrier for men to continue indulging in boyish fantasies about wars, weapons and heroic deeds, then surely the point of SATC is that age cannot be a barrier for women to indulge in their girlish fantasies about fashion, family and frivolous fun?
“Acceptable”? People are saying that the characters were two-dimensional and boring. I don’t think that’s “acceptable” in any show I plan on watching regardless of the overarching theme.
I’ll happily say the characters in The Expendables were thinly developed excuses to hang a bunch of explosions and 1980’s action flick nostalgia on. If you want to compare the cast of SATC to that, I’m fine with it. You won’t find me inflating the cinematic value of The Expendables though or its worth to the male psyche.
But, like I said, I’m not the target audience. You’re obviously far more invested in liking the show than I am in not liking it so I don’t really have a bunch of paragraphs to offer about Byronic such-and-such. I just thought the writing was extremely hackneyed and the characters dull and uninteresting whether they talked about vibrators or whether they talked about church.
The film was written by gays for gays only they cast females as the leads. Big artistic license. Again, some of the writing was clever but not as clever as they though they were being.
The Sopranos is a good example of a series that got worse and worse as time went on, and the reason is because the writers got lazy or too self-important to care about quality control.
Or lack of ability, as the case may be. HBO signed both casts to 6 year commitments. It’s incredibly hard to maintain good writing throughout the lifetime of any show.
What’s wrong,Jackie? Do the lunch scenes take you back to those depressing,desperately lonely lunch hours where nobody would come over and sit by you?
The thing about shows with anti-hero/ine types is that subtly, there’s something so amazing that you want to be them.
House MD can just be a dick to everyone and there are no consequences. Who hasn’t wanted to tell off their boss and then have the boss admit they were right?
Tony Soprano has the connections to punish anyone who crosses him. Who hasn’t wished for that power at one time or another?
Dexter metes out perfect justice to ultimate wrongdoers. Sign me up!
If anyone, ever, has wanted to be like the women in SATC, I feel pity for them. They are both uninteresting and pathetic. The power to bankrupt yourself buying shoes while bitching to your pals about how you can’t find a sugar daddy fast enough! Well golly, who hasn’t dreamed of such a life??