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Meaningless Sex and the City Sex and the City is back like a bad case of chlamydia. The show itself has finally gotten as limp as the random matings it depicts. You get more intimacy on cable channel J. Sex and the City is as overrated as losing your virginity and—premium cable fees being what they are—probably more expensive. Carrie Bradshaw, the lead character, is a sex columnist who breaks hearts, busts up marriages, and writes about it. She spends the remainder of each episode pondering why she and her friends can’t find gorgeous, wealthy, permanent male escorts to provide them with hourly orgasms, lavish them with gifts from Bergdorf Goodman, accompany their Lhasa Apsos to psychotherapy, and empathize with the trials and tribulations of surfing the net for size 4 Aigner pumps. When Carrie and her friends sit down to lunch—which I’d give a thousand dollars to see happen, just once, at Burger King—you don’t hear four women having a lively conversation. You hear fourteen writers trying to top each other. The dialogue, though perhaps clever as anything ever heard on television, is as heavy-handed as Edgar Bergen. During their frequent four-play, Carrie and her friends never talk about the economy. They never talk about women in the workplace, other than having intercourse there. There was no deadlocked presidential race in Sex and the City. There is no global warming. There is no 9/11. If there ever is, it’ll be Samantha complaining that all the cute firemen are gone. The women not only sleep with sailors—they out-curse them. C’mon, girls. All those BAs just to rap about BJs? Balancing these four vapid women requires an endless string of equally vapid male characters, which the series does extraordinarily well. With a couple of notable exceptions, central casting has provided a kennel of 25 to 45-year-old hunks preoccupied with their pecs, their portfolios, and the notches on their bedposts. For a half hour each Sunday night, we get to watch the blonde leading the blind to a brief, mindless coupling in a SoHo loft. Not willing to leave smarmy and predictable enough alone, Carrie Bradshaw opens each episode with a hackneyed, double-entendre question and closes it with a summary of what she learned--kind of like John Boy Walton on ecstasy. Hey, Carrie--how about opening the next episode with the following koan: Is it possible for a shallow person to experience a deep relationship? To quiet critics, last season they made Miranda an accidental mom. Between the hapless pushover father of the baby and the au pair, she’s got more relief pitching than the ’98 Yankees. Still, she complains. And she’s the best of the lot. The other three are no more prepared to be mothers than Gary Condit is prepared to be a guidance counselor at Smith College. One liquid diaper and Samantha would be out of there so fast the bassinet would spin. Carrie’s only shot would be to skip the first eighteen years and get right to that heart-to-heart on inserting the diaphragm. Sex and the City is not social satire. All in the Family was social satire. Seinfeld was social satire. Social satire exaggerates the foibles of its characters and asks you to laugh at them. Sex and the City presents its greedy, immature, self-absorbed, self-centered, materialistic, fetishistic, small-minded characters as this side of normal and tells you to laugh with them. In the 80s, Huey Lewis told us it was hip to be square. Today, HBO tells us it’s hip to be bare, so long as it’s with a stranger carrying a VISA Platinum card. Sadly, these characters are pushing both middle age and our willingness to view them as sympathetic. At twenty, playing hard-to-get and wanting only what you cannot have may be exciting. At thirty, it’s old. At forty, it’s pathetic. Sure, lots of people watch the series. Lots of people watch Springer, the WWF, and infomercials on hair loss. But you can already feel the final-season cramps. Gimmicks and celebrity cameos are becoming as common as the one-night-stand. HBO has taken the obscene liberty of referring to the central characters as the fab four. Try crab four. Any week now, Lizzie Grubman will be making a guest appearance as a hit-and-run lover. Mid-August promises a messy rendezvous between Carrie Bradshaw and former GE chairman Jack Welch. As a high school history teacher of mine once said about the Holy Roman Empire (it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire), Sex and the City is really about neither sex nor the city. Boring though it sounds, over ninety percent of all sex occurs between two people who have known each other for quite some time and are committed to each other’s well-being. My native New York is full of such people. This show should have been called Quickies in Silvercup Studios. Click here to rant back. |