And Just Like That…
Okay, I was hesitant to write about this show because I know the first season was pretty cringe, and we were merely hate watching it. And I know it was probably cringe for the same reason that a lot of these reboots of hit shows from twenty, thirty years ago are cringe: they’re trying to make up for their lack of inclusivity back in the day by now cramming in everyone they missed, characters who are not always people as much as stand-ins for entire communities. No one person can stand in for a whole community, and if you write minority characters like that, you inevitably miss a lot of detail, have characters who speak not like people do, but like someone might if you boiled down whole cultures and systemic issues and spectrums of personality into a few words a person can say in the handful of minutes they have on screen before they’re shooed off again. It inevitably reads as flat, as cringe, no matter the goodness of the intentions.
And sometimes the intentions aren’t even good. I was reading Framing Blackness by Ed Guerrero, this book on the history of Black representation in Hollywood, and he was talking about how the whole Blaxploitation movement (Shaft, Superfly, Sweet Sweetback) happened because Hollywood was going broke and Black people were going to the movies and they figured if they made low budget movies where Black people weren’t just villains and nobodies and mammies, more Black people would buy tickets and they’d get their money back tenfold. It worked, and then later, when Hollywood was back on its feet, it went back to its old ways. So the inclusivity in shows these days could just be because it’s currently profitable to be inclusive, and when it stops being profitable?
I’d like to think the Sex & the City reboot is doing something a little more gracious than just chasing the money. As naive as it might be, I’d like to think that this reboot is trying to make up for all the people of color and all the queer & trans people who might have been watching the old show, trying to see themselves in it somewhere. I want to believe that this new inclusivity is less about profit and more about making amends. I’m sorry you only got to play waiters and taxi drivers and edgy people to have sex with in the old version — look, now you’re a professor! Now you’re a filmmaker or a politician or a Michelin chef. You’re a comedian down on your luck, but look, you don’t even have to keep dating Miranda, you can date a hot queer person just like you.
Maybe it is just about profit, but I appreciate the effort anyway. I loved Lisa & Herbert and all of the quiet moments they got to themselves, how they weren’t just the Black friends, floating in isolation, there to prove something, to deny the thorough Whiteness of the show. They had inside jokes and arguments and quirks, and then, ultimately, a complicated sad thing happens to them that they get to resolve in-house. They are not there to serve the White characters or even made to always be on their p’s and q’s. They’re able to make mistakes (something Black people are rarely able to do without consequence, on TV and in real life), to be imperfect and still be loved, by each other most of all.
I loved that, and I loved Nya, the professor, who also gets to make mistakes, at times is selfish and is definitely not there just to be any White person’s emotional support. She even gets to be a bad friend sometimes: in a post-breakup frenzy, she discovers dating apps and then hooks up so loudly that Miranda can’t sleep. Later, she ditches Miranda at a party where she promised to support her, going instead to flirt with the five-star chef. She’s allowed to put herself first, and while this means maybe she is not someone we one hundred percent aspire to be or to befriend, her character is all the more important because of it.
Black friend characters, especially Black women friend characters, are often made to be these self-sacrificing, makeshift therapist (or actual therapist) figures there to make sure White people always have what they need. I want to say that maybe this impulse to have Black people serve is left over from slavery, but even if it’s a much less violent, much less fixed dynamic than slavery was, it’s still not a good look to have Black characters who can only serve other people and never themselves.
I love that this show doesn’t do that. I love how the Black people in it (and other minority characters, like Seema and Che) get to be people, that they get to have their own stories with their own orbits, orbits that do not center Whiteness. I love that this is a show about women in their 50s whose lives are just as enriched and complicated and sex-interested as they were in their 30s. I love how the fumbling of the first season caused the show to look inward in the second and self-correct instead of digging in its cringe, all-inclusive heels. It’s a good show, and no matter the motive for all of its changes, this time around, I loved feeling a little more seen.
Image: Reuters
