Sex and the City fans might remember the fictional Vogue editor Enid Frick, played by the inimitable Candice Bergen, for both her icy demeanor and immortal words of advice. “The key to having it all,” she once told a young Carrie Bradshaw, is to “stop expecting it to look like what you thought it was going to look like.” By “it”, she meant both fall collections and the less-than-ideal realities of romantic partnership, but I couldn’t help but wonder, would she say the same of television reboots?
And Just Like That, the sequel to the beloved HBO series, decidedly failed to meet SATC fans’ expectations. The stellar ratings of season one, which debuted last year with an audience of 1.1m households, plummeted to less than half of that for the premiere of season two; for many viewers, Miranda’s Che Diaz-induced spiral had undoubtedly killed the desire to keep tuning in. Season one relied so heavily on cringe-inducing, hapless gags that when they thankfully stopped in the second season, the show lost all momentum; with no backup plan for what the characters might do instead, their worlds felt strangely inert. The highlight of Carrie’s lifeless affair with her producer, devoid of any personality, excitement or sexual tension, was learning to poach an egg. Amid Harry’s improbable desire to wear a top hat to the Met Ball, we were suddenly watching a show about nothing – not the comedic nothing of Seinfeld or Curb Your Enthusiasm, but the miserable nothing of characters with no ambitions or stakes.
