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Almost everywhere we look, TV and film are hell-bent on portraying characters with exorbitant amounts of wealth. I’m tired of it.
And Just Like That, the Sex and the City reboot, has had largely negative – if not heavily mixed – reviews since it premiered a few years ago. And for many viewers, its loss wouldn’t be that heartfelt were it not a symbolic ending to the beloved world of Carrie Bradshaw and co.
Having said that, since news broke of its demise and the subsequent premiere of the series finale, everyone who spent weeks hating on this bizarre and frankly terribly written (and poorly lit?) show has been emerging from the woodwork with emotional long-reads and op-eds about how devastated they are it’s all finally over.
Even as the self-proclaimed Sex and the City aficionado I know I am, these reactions have felt a little too sincere for my tastes. Too overtly emotional for a series that had left all the charm of the original episodes back in the early 2000s.
It’s not even that I hated the reboot. If anything, I felt so nonplussed about it that even a negative critique would be asking too much of me. So far the past few days, I’ve been trying to pinpoint why exactly I felt so emotionally detached from the same characters I watched voraciously in the original show.
That’s when I stumbled across Sophie Gilbert’s piece for The Atlantic, which bemoans the overwhelming display of opulent wealth on modern TV. From And Just Like That to The White Lotus, it feels like almost every character we tune in to watch these days is exorbitantly wealthy – and thus entirely unrelatable.
‘And Just Like That has never been a particularly imaginative show with regard to women in midlife,’ writes Gilbert, ‘but there’s still something fundamentally off about seeing one of the canonical female characters of our era transformed into a Gilded Age archetype, worrying about a garden renovation and choosing back-ordered fabric for a chaise.’
The dissonance between this version of Carrie and the grungy, chain-smoking, frizzy haired girl we meet in episode one of Sex and the City is tangible. It also reflects a trend within popular culture that seems hellbent on force-feeding us a lifestyle that we’re growing ever more distant from in reality.
It’s no secret that the vast majority of us are suffering through a cost of living crisis, whilst watching genocide and war unravel in various places worldwide. Tuning in to watch a group of women stroll around with Birkin bags and bemoan the minutiae of their million dollar New York apartment buildings may once have felt like fitting escapism, but it now leaves a sour taste in even the most sentimentalist mouths.
It’s not just me and Gilbert who feel this way. Stuart Heritage recently unpacked the dominance of uber-rich characters for The Guardian, citing shows such as The Four Seasons and Mountainhead in what he dubs the ‘Selling Sunset-ification of television.’
‘When we’re confronted with such an unyielding parade of upscale comfort, the effect isn’t as aspirational as producers probably think. We aren’t left with a growling envy of how the other half lives; we’re instead left worrying that they wouldn’t know what real life was like if you bonked them over the head with a Poundland flipflop.’
Now I’m not saying that every piece of media we consume needs to reflect the realities of everyday life. Far from it, in fact. During times of economic, social and political unrest – and really, whenever we’re navigating the everyday doldrums of being a human – escapism into fantasy and fiction is vital.
But Heritage and Gilbert both speak to the issue with TV’s reliance on wealth: it’s often unnecessary, and therefore insulting.
