The lines outside of Magnolia Bakery – where Carrie Bradshaw enjoyed the dry cakes with too much frosting – aren’t as long as they used to be, though there are still plenty of SATC tour buses roaming the winding West Village streets. The affection for this late-90s/early-00s show never seems to disappear, though the New York it inhabited certainly has.
Speaking to the show’s popularity, a stray Instagram post that Sarah Jessica Parker posted on Tuesday once again ignited speculation that she was working on a third spinoff movie. “Well. I guess the cat’s out of the (little brown) bag,” she wrote under the picture of her leaving Bloomingdale’s with one of its famous shopping bags. “As usual, we will keep you posted on every detail as we are able. I’m under a strict gag order until then.”
Most likely this had to do with her shoe line, the SJP Collection, which will probably be available shortly at Bloomingdale’s (or she is working on some other collaboration with the department store). But SJP knows people will always click on a headline about Sex and the City 3 and carefully couched her message to maximize intrigue. (Warner Bros, the studio that made the films, issued a statement to say there is no SATC movie in development.) It doesn’t help that the show’s executive producer, Michael Patrick King, has kept rumours about the project alive all these years.
Nevertheless, the show now seems highly dated for modern New Yorkers. When it first aired, we were in a time of conspicuous consumption, when Carrie and her friends were the coolest kids at the party (or the bottle service club) in their ridiculously expensive designer clothes and strappy sandals. They were the aspirational fantasy for people living less-glitzy lives in quieter places.
Carrie Bradshaw lived the dream. Somehow, on a journalist’s salary, she was able to go shopping with her best girlfriends at the city’s finest boutiques and dine out at the most fabulous restaurants. Perhaps it was since she lived in a rent-controlled apartment. Even if that was ever achievable, the crash of 2008, which happened just before SATC 2 went into production, put frivolous luxury out of reach. It was hard for people to imagine buying $1,200 tutus when they were struggling to make their rent.
Manhattan itself has also changed. In the wake of the crash, foreigners buying luxury condos propped up the city’s real estate market. The average cost of a Manhattan apartment hit $1.69m in 2014. Samantha Jones bought a cheap apartment in the Meatpacking district, which is now home to the new Whitney museum and a host of luxury goods boutiques. The transgender sex workers that she threw eggs at have been moved along.
Miranda moved to Brooklyn for a quieter life and a cheaper apartment, but average rent in Brooklyn is now more than $2,700 a month. And while there is plenty of sex still going on, the city is quieter. Much of Manhattan has been taken over by bland chain establishments – the only ones than can afford the retail space – and the housing stock is taken up by absentee oligarchs and shadowy billionaires, the 0.001% who can afford the exorbitant prices.
Carrie and her crew aren’t as cool as they used to be, either in New York or in the world of entertainment. The hip kids these days (living in those overpriced Brooklyn apartments) are less about designer labels than they are trying to live authentic lives with batch-made denim and artisanal pickles. Farm-to-table, and the accompanying rustic vibe, is the hottest foodie trend, not bougie nouvelle cuisine served in establishments with burnished surfaces and chandeliers.
When SATC was in its prime it attracted plenty of imitators (remember Cashmere Mafia and Lipstick Jungle?), but now its comedy game is quite old. Girls debuted with the inevitable (if misguided) comparisons to SATC. (Can’t four young women live in New York and be funny without having to live up to Bradshaw’s spectre ?) But they weren’t living in glitzy Manhattan – they were trying to make it work in Brooklyn, shuttling from job to job, attempting to figure out what they wanted in life.
We always knew what Carrie and co wanted: fancy apartments, rich boyfriends, cute shoes, crazy clothes, invites to good parties and gay best friends – maybe not in that order. And no one really wants to be a Hannah or a Marnie the way that they wanted to be a Carrie or Charlotte. Hannah wears ill-fitting jumpsuits with stains on the front and her abhorrent narcissism is used for cringe-inducing laughs in a way that Carrie’s never was.
While Abby and Ilana on Broad City are much more likeable, their show is about the desperation (and the joy) of living in New York in your 20s, working at a dead-end job and just trying to have fun with your friends with absolutely no money at all. Even when Carrie struggled financially, she rebounded with a book deal and a job at Vogue on $4 a word. Ilana on Broad City steals the free products at the gym, maniacally pumping the moisturizer in a Ziplock bag.
This is the space culture inhabits now, not idealising the cosmopolitan experience (or the cosmopolitan cocktail) but drawing humour from the harsh reality of what life in New York is like – a life that is invariably taking place in the outer boroughs. But SATC still has something neither Girls or Broad City, for all their critical cache, has never achieved: massive popularity. Though time and trends have marched on, it seems that people still prefer the dream of a city that no longer exists and the ghost of a sequel that never might come to light to facing the bleaker facts of New York as it is today.
