Farewell Carrie Bradshaw, the imperfect radical

New Statesman​

3 days ago

I feel so lonely, I said to myself, after the first episode of And Just Like That. I feel like my friends have died and they've been replaced by these robots, and I'm trying to love the robots, and I don't know if I can. Like many people, I did learn to love the robots, but the show that is widely considered to be one of the worst remakes in television history has been cancelled and people are upset. A table of women next to me yesterday, descendants of Samantha, Carrie, Charlotte and Miranda, asked each other, over cocktails, why they'd killed it just when it was getting good. The woman who has played Carrie Bradshaw for over half her life is rumoured to be searching for another outlet for her character. The problem is, young people hate Carrie Bradshaw. But ask Carrie's haters which of the girls in Sex And The City they like best and they'll say, 'Well, Carrie, obviously…'
Bradshaw will always be the closest television could get to a universal self. She was deep and superficial, flawed and eternally upbeat. It was never quite clear whether her internal narration was honest reflection or a self-serving performance, but isn't that true for all of us? Bad with money, she was goofy and confessional, like an early blogger. She was afraid of her own inner cynic – so she lived as though she was in a movie, and it gave her actions a touch of class. Her emotional life was chaotic, but she always hit her mark and found her light, like a catwalk model. There was mystery: she wore her bra in bed.
At the heart of the debate about Sex And The City's reboot – why some people hated it, and some were desperate to love the robots – are intergenerational culture wars, some of which the writers back-peddled furiously to accommodate in its first season, introducing non-binary characters and two very rich ones of colour in an attempt to counter the original show's terminal whiteness. Those who didn't watch Sex And the City the first time round would be thoroughly justified in finding the reboot shallow and strange – it is shallow and strange! Mammon has long bestrode the women's lives, in a preoccupation with all things material, and ghastly product placement was epitomised, for me, in the second feature-length film when Charlotte holds up a tube of Pringles on a plane to Abu Dhabi. By the time the reboot came along, Carrie, whose late husband Big is described in the pilot as 'a better-looking Donald Trump', has no need to work at all.
Yet Sex And The City did change everything. Straight men were deeply irritated, when it began, that Carrie Bradshaw was considered 'attractive'. Suddenly women in pubs and university halls were talking about masturbation, and being sexually unsatisfied. Sex And The City showed that friendships are the primary relationships of life, and that some people are happier out of love than in it. It showed that many women feel sick and panicky when they see a detached house in the suburbs: only Charlotte is a mother by choice, and she faces infertility. Bradshaw's only successful relationship is with New York: she's a post-war Dorothy Parker, fearless in the city. Falling in and out of love was almost tidal: it didn't serve a purpose. Underneath the play acting was a free spirit, and from the outside it looked like loneliness.
The younger generation, who work so hard to be thoughtful, boundaried people, are told that Carrie changed things for women, so you can imagine the affrontery they feel watching her actual behaviour: they analyse her hypocrisies and self-centredness in YouTube edits, the chaos she creates. The girls' strategy, like women of the Seventies and Eighties, was to learn to be self-centred, and their feminism – this is what I want! – looks brash and unnuanced today. Written by Gen-Xers, the show was completely free from therapy speak and introspection: Carrie only seems crazy in 2025. There are no howls of anguish, no what the fuck is wrong with me, as they move from dating disaster to dating disaster. Instead, they look outward and blame everyone else: Mr Pussy, the man who pooed with the door open. Human beings are still innately self-centred, still just as likely to drop their friends if they get a date, but these days we're required to perform empathy. Carrie annoys us because she unapologetically did what we're all desperately trying to avoid doing. Everyone identifies with her, but people want to be seen as more.
The original Sex And The City columns, by Candace Bushnell, were written from a place of nihilism (she got a flat fee of $100k for the screen rights and has never made money from the shows) and are brilliant, and dark. Long before internet dating she asked, 'How did we get here?' She wrote about the death of love, about toxic bachelors and ghosting by another name. The book seethes with internalised misogyny: a male character talks about the thirties 'power flip' when men get their pick of women in the same black cocktail dress with the same blonde bob working desperately against their biological clocks. New York is a throbbing hive of emotional abuse and empty aspiration, the friendships are cool and undefined.
The writers of the TV show added hope, determined to love New York where Bushnell was starting to struggle. But the generation that hates Carrie is in the grip of a dating crisis far worse than she ever was, desperate to get off the apps but unsure where love exists if not there. And Just Like That – with some dignity – kept Carrie off social media and away from modern journalism (she didn't get on very well with podcasts either). Her column was a unilateral platform that no longer exists. You can't be light and whimsical, talk in assumptions and generalisations, in a world of multiple voices. That's the biggest change in feminism, and probably the biggest change for Carrie Bradshaw too.
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In the penultimate episode, she goes to a house party at the old, beloved apartment she inhabited for the entirety of the original show, then passed on to a millennial jewellery designer Lisette, with a big dose of 'I see a lot of myself in you'. The house, like the city, was her longest relationship: she is genuinely afraid she will want to live there again. She finds it full of new partitions – young people crammed in to share the rent. But Lisette only has flatmates, she confides in Carrie, because she can't stand living alone. What if someone crawls through the window and murders her? This generation is not fearless in the city. You can see Carrie retreating into herself like a whelk. She gives one of her down-home quips: 'I guess whoever said you should never go home was right!' Lisette's phone flashes. 'That would be novelist Thomas Wolf.' You thought she'd visit her old apartment and find she'd changed, but it's everything around that her that has.
For me, the thing that really stands out watching Carrie Bradshaw old and new is the untapped potential of her character. A witty, educated star writer who never talks about art, literature, culture or politics? Favourite book? Rilke's love poems. Does she know who the mayor is? Yes, but she's more interested in who he's dating. Oh to hear her talking about Giuliani – or Trump – rather than shoes. Her smartness has outgrown her subjects, and her strange historical romance novel she's writing seems beneath her. Until the end, that is. She keeps her character single, and her editor complains that she's written a romantic tragedy. 'What's tragic about a woman alone in a garden?' she asks. As the other characters in And Just Like That shrank away, it became clear that Carrie Bradshaw doesn't want to be in a relationship, not really. I'd have watched her ten years from now, elderly in Manhattan, with her single or widowed old friends. That would have been revolutionary too – but quietly, this time.
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