Pretend it’s not a car crash

Hands up if you’ve been watching And Just Like That, the current reboot of Sex and the City. Keep your hand up if you’re enjoying it. Really? There’s one person? Well, whatever turns your crank, I guess.

Don’t get me wrong. I used to love Sex and the City. When the first film came out I actually went to see it at the cinema, but it was sold out, so I ended up seeing In Bruges instead, which, although I didn’t know it at the time, turned out to be a win for me. Still, some months later, when I was in Vancouver staying with my friend Catherine, the day it came out on DVD we both bought a copy. (Mine was actually a present for her and went back to the shop.) As we were watching it that night we were also giving each other sideways glances. Had it always been this bad? Had they always been this annoying? Why didn’t we remember?

Charlotte, little miss sunshine, has never been anything but beyond the pale, but used to like Miranda and Samantha and, indeed, Carrie. Despite her fashion obsession, Carrie had a couple of things going for her. She was a writer; she always had a snappy (usually sarcastic) comeback and then there was Big. I’ve had my own run ins with fabulous and completely unobtainable men, so I sympathised. I even rooted for Big over Aidan, because why would you settle for a perfectly nice guy when you could waste your life on a bastard? And of course he got her in the end. They really should have left it there.

Kim Cattrall wisely said not on your nellie. Obviously she could smell the stink from the off. She must be sitting somewhere laughing quietly (or even raucously) to herself. 

This show is car crash television.

Charlotte is still annoying, but so too now is the once dependable, now constantly moaning Miranda. Spoiler alert: If you haven’t watched the new show, but think you still might, don’t read any further.

And then there’s Carrie. I understand that she wouldn’t want to continue living in the gorgeous Manhattan apartment she shared with Big, but moving back into her thirty-something brownstone studio flat that she’s apparently never sold? Okay, I kinda get the never selling it. It was the place she went to write. I wish I had a place where I could go to write – especially if it had no internet to distract me. But she’s now a wealthy widow in her fifties. She could afford to live anywhere on Manhattan. The ridiculously modernistic apartment she did buy and live in for one night before scurrying back to her bolt hole was so obviously not Carrie it was a very bad joke.

Anyway… Despite the three women now annoying me in equal measure (oddly I’ve warmed to Antony, who I never used to like), I decided to stick with it until Carrie put herself back in the dating pool, which she now has. 

It’s over.

Last year, when the reboot was announced, a friend sent me this piss take that was doing the rounds.

At the time Martin Scorsese’s excellent documentary about Fran Lebowitz was topping the Netflix charts. I told my friend that was a show I would watch.

Now I desperately wish it was the show. Can you imagine Fran in the midst of these three moaning minnies, chain smoking and telling them all, in a way only Fran could, to get the fuck over themselves? That, my friends, would be quality television.

Back to Netflix (might even watch Pretend It’s a City again to get the taste out of my mouth) and BritBox. 

PS Read the comments. Yes, I did leave out the excruciating worst of it.