"Sex and the City" is celebrating its twentieth birthday, and it's everywhere. And so: some observations.
-"Playbill" tracks "the girls" through their varying Broadway careers. No surprise: Cynthia Nixon did the most--and the most-interesting--work. She landed her Tony for "Rabbit Hole." (Not one of the other three has a Tony.) Nixon famously appeared in two Broadway shows at once, when she was very young; she would slip off-stage, cross the street, and get into a new costume, night after night. Kristin Davis was in a 2012 revival of "The Best Man" with Elizabeth Ashley--who knew?--and Kim Cattrall made her Broadway debut opposite Ian McKellan. And, of course, Sarah Jessica Parker was once Annie. This walk down memory lane generated questions--for me, at least--about the most mysterious of the four women, Kristin Davis. Did you know she went to Rutgers? And she started drinking because she wanted to combat her own shyness, and then she quickly became an alcoholic? And then she quit at twenty-two, and she misses alcohol everyday. (This is the kind of reading I do at work.)
-Vulture has an important piece, an oral history of "Splat!" This is the episode toward the very end of the show's run, when Kristen Johnston falls to her death from a window. We learn--from Vulture--that Johnston had been "out of the scene" for a while, when she was approached to do "Splat!" She worried about her weight. A writer had an acquaintance who had committed suicide from an actual NYC window--and he wanted that very window reconstructed for "Splat!" Can this really be the first time "SATC" had ever killed off a character? The writers wanted a real shock. Candice Bergen recalls the "weirdness and intelligence" of the script. (One writer: "Our best ideas happened when we took something from our actual life, then heightened the details.") The death of Johnston's character was needed as a way of getting Carrie to move out of New York City. Johnston herself performed the fall--it was only around one foot--and the other actors worried about producing the right reaction face (because, of course, they were reacting to nothing).
-Cynthia Nixon has an Emmy for "SATC." And Sarah Jessica Parker, as well. And SJP has quite a shocking number of Golden Globe Awards from these six seasons (and Kim Cattrall has just one).
-The NYT asks us to enjoy Kim Cattrall's speaking voice. The writer observes that Cattrall's actual voice is very different from the silly voice she uses for Samantha. Among many gifts: Cattrall's voice gives us every damn consonant in every word, all the time. (The writer lingers on the crispness with which Cattrall attacks the word DIDN'T.) Cattrall's friends include Isabelle Huppert--again, who knew?--and you can hear the two of them shooting the breeze in one podcast. In another podcast, Cattrall investigates the subtle pejorative quality of the adjective "childless." And then I guess you can also hear her go on at length about her difficulties with chronic insomnia. She's a thinker and a storyteller. I really, really like Kim Cattrall.
-For a while, recently, my husband and I were watching old episodes of "SATC." We were watching bits of Seasons One and Four; we would alternate, not by design. I noticed I enjoyed some of the quieter choices--beyond all the bombast of "the Rabbit," or of Charlotte agreeing to have an artist paint her lady parts. (For the record, "Splat!" gets attention for being one of the great TV episodes of all time, in addition to the Season Four story about Miranda's filial loss: "My Motherboard, My Self.") I remember really liking a story where Carrie gets involved with an insufferable jazz musician (Craig Bierko), and Mr. Big can't quite accept that he himself is now romantically out of the picture. And the story where a married man hosts Carrie in his Hamptons cottage, and addresses her with his dick hanging out (and this is just one inch inside the border of things-that-count-as-ambiguous). I loved Carrie inventing a risque children's book--"She travels by means of her magic cigarette!"--as a way of investigating the phenomenon that is Big's ex-wife. And the fart in bed, which creates a rupture in the early Big/Carrie courtship--a rupture that isn't needed, and that is compounded, and compounded again, by miscommunication. And the hostility and judgment Carrie encounters when her old friend, a former party girl, moves to Connecticut and becomes a Stepford Wife. There's genuine interest in the complexities of human interaction here. I can relate to Carrie's uncertainty and anxiety. Sex is there, yes, but a good deal of the story material just comes from the problems of being human and skeptical in a puzzling world.
-We haven't talked about Emily Nussbaum. Google her with "SATC." She wrote a major game-changing piece on "SATC," positioning the four ladies as anti-heroines, as female variations on a Tony Soprano theme. She expressed frustration that the four were treated dismissively in the great book "Difficult Men," which focuses on Tony, on Walter of "Breaking Bad," on Dexter of "Dexter," and on a few other male characters. "Difficult Men" wrongly characterizes "SATC" as "just a show about four pretty ladies in Manhattan." Amy Bloom says Nussbaum's corrective piece "is true, sharp, and smart, and helps us see--just a little--the water we all swim in." I agree. To "SATC"! To Nussbaum! To the Golden Age of HBO!
-"Playbill" tracks "the girls" through their varying Broadway careers. No surprise: Cynthia Nixon did the most--and the most-interesting--work. She landed her Tony for "Rabbit Hole." (Not one of the other three has a Tony.) Nixon famously appeared in two Broadway shows at once, when she was very young; she would slip off-stage, cross the street, and get into a new costume, night after night. Kristin Davis was in a 2012 revival of "The Best Man" with Elizabeth Ashley--who knew?--and Kim Cattrall made her Broadway debut opposite Ian McKellan. And, of course, Sarah Jessica Parker was once Annie. This walk down memory lane generated questions--for me, at least--about the most mysterious of the four women, Kristin Davis. Did you know she went to Rutgers? And she started drinking because she wanted to combat her own shyness, and then she quickly became an alcoholic? And then she quit at twenty-two, and she misses alcohol everyday. (This is the kind of reading I do at work.)
-Vulture has an important piece, an oral history of "Splat!" This is the episode toward the very end of the show's run, when Kristen Johnston falls to her death from a window. We learn--from Vulture--that Johnston had been "out of the scene" for a while, when she was approached to do "Splat!" She worried about her weight. A writer had an acquaintance who had committed suicide from an actual NYC window--and he wanted that very window reconstructed for "Splat!" Can this really be the first time "SATC" had ever killed off a character? The writers wanted a real shock. Candice Bergen recalls the "weirdness and intelligence" of the script. (One writer: "Our best ideas happened when we took something from our actual life, then heightened the details.") The death of Johnston's character was needed as a way of getting Carrie to move out of New York City. Johnston herself performed the fall--it was only around one foot--and the other actors worried about producing the right reaction face (because, of course, they were reacting to nothing).
-Cynthia Nixon has an Emmy for "SATC." And Sarah Jessica Parker, as well. And SJP has quite a shocking number of Golden Globe Awards from these six seasons (and Kim Cattrall has just one).
-The NYT asks us to enjoy Kim Cattrall's speaking voice. The writer observes that Cattrall's actual voice is very different from the silly voice she uses for Samantha. Among many gifts: Cattrall's voice gives us every damn consonant in every word, all the time. (The writer lingers on the crispness with which Cattrall attacks the word DIDN'T.) Cattrall's friends include Isabelle Huppert--again, who knew?--and you can hear the two of them shooting the breeze in one podcast. In another podcast, Cattrall investigates the subtle pejorative quality of the adjective "childless." And then I guess you can also hear her go on at length about her difficulties with chronic insomnia. She's a thinker and a storyteller. I really, really like Kim Cattrall.
-For a while, recently, my husband and I were watching old episodes of "SATC." We were watching bits of Seasons One and Four; we would alternate, not by design. I noticed I enjoyed some of the quieter choices--beyond all the bombast of "the Rabbit," or of Charlotte agreeing to have an artist paint her lady parts. (For the record, "Splat!" gets attention for being one of the great TV episodes of all time, in addition to the Season Four story about Miranda's filial loss: "My Motherboard, My Self.") I remember really liking a story where Carrie gets involved with an insufferable jazz musician (Craig Bierko), and Mr. Big can't quite accept that he himself is now romantically out of the picture. And the story where a married man hosts Carrie in his Hamptons cottage, and addresses her with his dick hanging out (and this is just one inch inside the border of things-that-count-as-ambiguous). I loved Carrie inventing a risque children's book--"She travels by means of her magic cigarette!"--as a way of investigating the phenomenon that is Big's ex-wife. And the fart in bed, which creates a rupture in the early Big/Carrie courtship--a rupture that isn't needed, and that is compounded, and compounded again, by miscommunication. And the hostility and judgment Carrie encounters when her old friend, a former party girl, moves to Connecticut and becomes a Stepford Wife. There's genuine interest in the complexities of human interaction here. I can relate to Carrie's uncertainty and anxiety. Sex is there, yes, but a good deal of the story material just comes from the problems of being human and skeptical in a puzzling world.
-We haven't talked about Emily Nussbaum. Google her with "SATC." She wrote a major game-changing piece on "SATC," positioning the four ladies as anti-heroines, as female variations on a Tony Soprano theme. She expressed frustration that the four were treated dismissively in the great book "Difficult Men," which focuses on Tony, on Walter of "Breaking Bad," on Dexter of "Dexter," and on a few other male characters. "Difficult Men" wrongly characterizes "SATC" as "just a show about four pretty ladies in Manhattan." Amy Bloom says Nussbaum's corrective piece "is true, sharp, and smart, and helps us see--just a little--the water we all swim in." I agree. To "SATC"! To Nussbaum! To the Golden Age of HBO!
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