Seeing that the lovely crew from SATC is about to dump a new load on unsuspecting movie theaters world-wide, I thought we'd let the great Chicago critic Lee Sandlin weigh in, in the smartest short capture of this toilet build-up.
If I had to pick my all-time favorite TV show, there’d be a long list of candidates. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Barney Miller, Berlin Alexanderplatz—and that’s just the Bs. But for my least favorite show, the one that makes me despair for the state of TV and for the whole miserable human species, there’s one that rises instantly to the top: Sex and the City. Nothing I’ve ever seen has ever made women look worse. You can ransack the archives of Spike TV, throw in the complete film libraries of Adam Sandler, Dane Cook, and Judd Apatow, and supplement them with the collected works of Henry Miller and Norman Mailer and you won’t find as unrelenting a portrayal of female humorlessness, avarice, petulance, vindictiveness, and off-the-charts narcissism.
One moment sums up the whole series. Good girl Charlotte strikes a deal with an upscale shoe salesman who has a foot fetish: she gets discounts on his hottest wares and he gets to fondle her feet. But in the end she has to bail, much as she hungers for the shoes, because she just finds the sight of him getting off on her feet too icky. In her value system, lusting after trendy objects is normal but lusting after the touch of human skin is grotesque.
The other characters may be boffing everything that moves, but in the end sex isn’t the main thing on their minds either. For ubercompetent corporate drone Miranda it’s being thought of as strong and successful, which is why her no-account slacker baby daddy is such a psychic burden for her. For our heroine Carrie, it’s being famous—recall that after she finally settles in Paris with her impossibly dreamy boyfriend, she has to ditch him and move back to Manhattan because she can’t bear that nobody in France knows who she is. Over the long haul, it becomes clear that even that omnivorous huntress Samantha is using sex as a kind of scorekeeping: ultimately she doesn’t care how the sex is so long as everybody perceives her as transcendently hot. For all these women, sex runs a distant second to status.
