"Sex and the City" always flirted with the weird flimsiness of modern gender - recall, in the very first episode, when Carrie says she wants to have sex "like a man" - and so it's worth pondering a simple question: What is the male version of "Sex and the City?"
The question itself holds a wealth of implicit gender assumptions which the show either broke down or built up, depending on your perspective and which season we're talking about. Is "Sex and the City" really a women's show? People talk dirty and make jokes about things you aren't supposed to make jokes about. There's copius female nudity and at least two or three sex scenes per episode - in fact, all that anyone seems able to talk about is sex and, more to the point, fucking.
From Charlotte: "Don't you ever want to be just pounded hard? Like when the bed is moving all around, and it's all sweaty, your head is knocking the headboard and you feel it might blow off? Dammit, I just really want to be fucked. Just really fucked!"
How is this not a schoolboy fantasy come to life?
Sure, women are the stars, but from start to finish, this is a show about men - landing them, screwing them, figuring them out, trying to ignore them, and ultimately loving them. (That's with the noteworthy exception of the strange, flawed, short, boring, yet kind of wonderful Season 5.) In the same episode where Samantha and the world meets Tom Reymi, Carrie is struggling with her conscience - she's cheating on nice-guy Aiden with bad-guy Big. Desperate for a happy ending, she tells Samantha, "You've heard stories about affairs where people realize how great their other relationship is and end it without anyone being the wiser."
Samantha retorts, almost angry, "I don't watch 'Lifetime Television for Women.''"
If this is a "women's show," then you have to point to Quentin Tarantino as the pre-eminent "women's director" of the last decade. Sure, he became famous for two guy's guy art flicks - the all-male cast of "Reservoir Dogs," the testosterone-ridden palookas firing guns and bible verses in "Pulp Fiction" - but "Jackie Brown" is all about Pam Grier, and "Kill Bill" features a cavalcade of strong, albeit twisted, female types (Vivica A. Fox is the suburban mom making war in her kitchen; Lucy Liu is a business woman who rises to the top of the most male-dominated business in the world, the Tokyo Yakuza; Uma Thurman is the knocked-up girl burnt by her ex who seeks vengeance on his new girlfriend and ends up as a mother to his child), and "Death Proof" is basically two episodes of "Sex and the City" plus a twenty-minute car chase.
But the show did become a true cultural phenomenon for women (and an anti-phenomenon for men.) And, in some ways, I think that Season 3 is the last time you can really watch the show as itself and not as its phenomenon - in fact, there's a point in the season where the show explicitly deconstructs its own cultural impact, and I don't know if it ever fully recovers (that would be Matthew McConaughey, playing himself as no one else can, begging Carrie to let him turn her column into a movie.) The first twelve episodes of the season, from the fireman's fashion show through Charlotte's wedding in the show's 42nd installment, represent the absolute peak of the show's powers - after the wedding, the gang flees to Los Angeles, and settles in for three more seasons of diminishing returns.
Truly, this is the Golden Age of "Sex and the City" - after all, this is the beginning of Carrie's relationship with Aidan, and more importantly, the Aidan/Big duality which dominates Carrie's personality and may, in fact, essentially symbolize women's relationship to the male race. When people think about "Sex and the City," I would venture to assume that they aren't thinking about the later seasons, when everyone is in long-term relationships and everyone has health problems and Baryshnikov tries acting; nor, for that matter, are they thinking about the early seasons, when Carrie talked to the camera but almost never mentioned shoes.
All TV shows that last several seasons, especially those which can be said to change the face of television, are really radically different within themselves. Usually, they're at least three different pieces, loosely but obviously divided across the show's run. The first season of "Sopranos" is completely different from the last season of "Sopranos" - the whole visual look of the show has changed into something more noirish, half of the supporting cast is dead, Anthony Jr. is a main character, no one ever has any fun, and Tony has become the villain. "Lost" is also miles away in season 4 than where it was in season 1 - in its primary narrative and thematic concerns, in its main characters (how could the show last so long without Ben?), in the length of its seasons and the level of production design. Even "Entourage," an ode to SoCal decadence, has become radically different in scope - less about Hollywood glamour and more about Hollywood business.
Yet still, we consider a TV show to be a single work, and when we think about the show in abstract, I would argue there is some precise period in the show's history which we consider. And this is it, right here, the vague eternal moment we talk about when we talk about "Sex and the City," the exact point when the show was equally funny and serious, equally about long-term relationships and one-night stands, equally focused on the women's relationship with their men and their relationship with each other. The show was occasionally better, but it was ever quite as perfect again.
This is, after all, the season in which Carrie asks "Are We Sluts?" That question (which is also the title of that great episode) is never quite answered by Carrie, and it's rarely repeated when people talk about the show, which is ironic, since most of the columns which criticize "Sex and the City" (especially ones like this, which draw comparisons or contrasts between the show and the fall of Hillary Clinton) are basically dancing around an answer: Yes You Are.
Are they sluts? That's a loaded word - like bitch or cocktease or whore or the c-word, you can make the argument that, because there's no similar derogatory term for men, the word is patently unfair, and should not be used in reference to anyone. Several vague statistics were thrown around the talkosphere after the Sex and the City Movie came out, to the effect that, although Carrie, Samantha, Miranda, and Charlotte sleep with more men in the show's run than the average American female, they sleep with the exact average amount of men for a New York woman. (Which doesn't really change the question - fundamentalist preachers and investment bankers would argue that that just proves that ALL New York Women are sluts.)
This all brings us back to the question - what is the male version of the show? The usual shorthand is to point to shows about a group of male friends having and talking about sex - "Queer as Folk," "Big Shots," and most specifically, "Entourage." After all, "Entourage" is basically the great American young male wet dream - hanging out, smoking weed, playing video games on a bigscreen projector, getting bottle service in clubs, hooking up with Mandy Moore, and best of all, getting to call it all Work.
Certainly, "Entourage" has been as much an essential Los Angeles monument as "Sex" was for New York; certainly, the interplay of the four friends on that other show seems to mirror the interplay of the four friends on this one. Vince is Carrie, the head of the group and the face of the show, who's also the least interesting character played by the least talented performer; Eric is Miranda, the most realistic character with an actual job and realistic relationship troubles, played with rueful sarcasm by the most subtle and poker-faced actor; Johnny Drama is Charlotte, lovably old-fashioned and lusting for an impossible dream (fame for Drama, true love for Charlotte); Turtle is Samantha, the extreme personification of the show's already extreme treatment of its respective gender (he: chubby, stoned, freeloading, unshaven, talks like he's listened to too much hip-hop; she: thin, fashionable, independent, endlessly sexual, refusing to age past 35.)
But the comparison doesn't quite hold. "Sex and the City" focuses its eye closely on every new man who comes into each girls' life, even if it's only to explore one particular detail; the women on "Entourage" are essentially the same hot early-20s model wannabes, except for those rare occasions when they're actually models. The relationships on "Sex and the City" are all about flirtation, where most of the relationships on "Entourage" skip straight to the sex. More generally, "Sex and the City" asks big questions - about gender, about city life, about modern day America - where "Entourage" lives in a zone of blissful ignorance. You could argue that it's precisely these differences that makes it "the male Sex and the City," just as you could argue that those differences make it "The West Coast Sex and the City."
In the middle of the third season of "Sex and the City," the whole gang goes to Los Angeles. They hang out at wild parties and meet famous Hollywood actors playing themselves (Matthew McConaughey) and playing other people (Vince Vaughn as a Hollywood douche, Sarah Michelle Gellar as a Hollywood douchette). Everyone they meet is incredibly good looking. They even go to the Playboy Mansion. Is it any coincidence that this is basically sums up "Entourage?" And it is another coincidence that these are the worst two episodes of the entire series?
Still, beyond the content of the shows, I think they're drastically different in the nature of their evolution. The first season of "Entourage," and especially the second one, is all about lovable decadence - it's not really about anything, and there's never really any major tension (both season finales hint at tension - will the group be broken up? - only to break that tension after a few moments, setting everything back to right.) Oddly enough, as the show become more dramatically intensive - with the ongoing Medellin plotline, with failure for the characters - it became less interesting, as if somehow the whole genius of the show was in its pop escapist vision of a world without consequence. It evolved as a show, but the phenomenon ended.
In Season 3, "Sex and the City" takes a similar move, becoming more dramatically intensive and moving away from the relatively flighty narratives of the first season. Season 3 truly starts to test the nature of the show: Charlotte gets married, the beginning of the end for the show's sexy-singles phase; Samantha and Charlotte quarrel, briefly breaking apart the friendship circle; Samantha gets sick, the first time we've ever seen her demonstrate any real weakness and the first time she ever seems to consider the disadvantages of singlehood; and, most importantly, Carrie sleeps with Big, cheating on Aidan, at the exact moment when everything in her life seems to be perfect.
"Sex and the City" had to evolve to become a true phenomenon, because after Carrie's affair with Big, the show gained an added heft, and a whiff of danger. The glam fashion-show image that tends to be propagated by the media doesn't quite do the show justice; nor, conversely, does the sexual-anthropological-analytical concept (Sex Columnist Debates Modern Female Issues) really get to the core of why the show is a true epic narrative, and not just a fuck-of-the-week. When Carrie sleeps with Big - doing it dirty, first in an elevator, and then in the bedroom, and then lazily smoking tobacco just before the credits roll - she becomes, briefly but effectively, her own show's villain.
This plotline is the show's greatest argument for itself, and also against itself - for once, Carrie's analytical mind (the invisible narrator, the columnist whose columns we never see) is not given the last word. I suspect this is because this is one of the few times that Carrie, or anyone on the show, does something truly dangerous, and sinful, and unforgivable, and yet also touchingly human. This is the first time that Cheating will play a major role in an ongoing plot arc - and considering how little screen time is devoted to Charlotte's dalliance with a gardener and Samantha's uncomfortable top-floor bonus screw with Richard, you could make the argument that this is truly the one Cheating Plot in the show's history. With the Carrie-Aidan-Big plotline, the show didn't just nail modern gender politics - it found a way to question our own preconceptions of the show and the show's initial concept.
I know many people who can't stand Carrie. I can't decide if that's because they don't like her as a character or as a person - that is, if they can't stand her for who she is or for what she does. True, she's a whiner, and so painfully into fashion as to basically ruin her bank account, and in later seasons she's got the most utterly painful habit of talking in cutesy black talk (we get our first taste of this quirk in the season 3 finale, in an exchange with trannie hookers.) All of that is why most men hate her. But she also makes poor decisions, and dates the wrong men, and complains to them without every really solving anything. That's why most women hate her - but only as friends hate friends who do stupid things. In fact, I don't think it's wrong to say that although all the girls on the show make bad decisions often, Carrie makes the worst decisions constantly.
The thing is, Carrie is a writer. Although we never actually get a look at her column, we can extrapolate that it is largely autobiographical. Her voiceover narration often bleeds into the writing; once her book is published, Mr. Big teasingly asks for his own name; at the beginning of season 3, her affair with a politico gets an anonymous tell-all, with the awful title "To Pee or Not to Pee." So she writes about herself and her mistakes constantly, and despite the fact that the end of each show is structured as an epiphany, she essentially learns nothing. She continues to make the same mistakes, in fact, makes even worse mistakes the further she goes (the downward trend from Aidan/Big to greedy ineffectual Berger and finally to the remote Aleksander is fine evidence of that.)
We should not forget that the entirety of "Sex and the City" is set many years after the golden age of these womens' lives. They are no longer in their twenties; it is a long time since sex, or even romance, was something new and unique; their bodies are beginning to fail them, in small ways (cellulite) and in large ways (infertility.) This shines a weird ironic light on all those college girls who idolize "Sex and the City," since the characters on the show hate college girls. (There's a great episode later in the series when Samantha hosts a party for an adolescent socialite who drinks, smokes, and fucks; the result plays like a pre-satire of "Gossip Girl," except played more realistic than anything on that other glam New York show.) The essential themes of "Sex and the City" are loneliness, frustration, confusion, and awkwardness. Girl power!
From Charlotte: "Don't you ever want to be just pounded hard? Like when the bed is moving all around, and it's all sweaty, your head is knocking the headboard and you feel it might blow off? Dammit, I just really want to be fucked. Just really fucked!"
How is this not a schoolboy fantasy come to life?
Sure, women are the stars, but from start to finish, this is a show about men - landing them, screwing them, figuring them out, trying to ignore them, and ultimately loving them. (That's with the noteworthy exception of the strange, flawed, short, boring, yet kind of wonderful Season 5.) In the same episode where Samantha and the world meets Tom Reymi, Carrie is struggling with her conscience - she's cheating on nice-guy Aiden with bad-guy Big. Desperate for a happy ending, she tells Samantha, "You've heard stories about affairs where people realize how great their other relationship is and end it without anyone being the wiser."
Samantha retorts, almost angry, "I don't watch 'Lifetime Television for Women.''"
If this is a "women's show," then you have to point to Quentin Tarantino as the pre-eminent "women's director" of the last decade. Sure, he became famous for two guy's guy art flicks - the all-male cast of "Reservoir Dogs," the testosterone-ridden palookas firing guns and bible verses in "Pulp Fiction" - but "Jackie Brown" is all about Pam Grier, and "Kill Bill" features a cavalcade of strong, albeit twisted, female types (Vivica A. Fox is the suburban mom making war in her kitchen; Lucy Liu is a business woman who rises to the top of the most male-dominated business in the world, the Tokyo Yakuza; Uma Thurman is the knocked-up girl burnt by her ex who seeks vengeance on his new girlfriend and ends up as a mother to his child), and "Death Proof" is basically two episodes of "Sex and the City" plus a twenty-minute car chase.
But the show did become a true cultural phenomenon for women (and an anti-phenomenon for men.) And, in some ways, I think that Season 3 is the last time you can really watch the show as itself and not as its phenomenon - in fact, there's a point in the season where the show explicitly deconstructs its own cultural impact, and I don't know if it ever fully recovers (that would be Matthew McConaughey, playing himself as no one else can, begging Carrie to let him turn her column into a movie.) The first twelve episodes of the season, from the fireman's fashion show through Charlotte's wedding in the show's 42nd installment, represent the absolute peak of the show's powers - after the wedding, the gang flees to Los Angeles, and settles in for three more seasons of diminishing returns.
Truly, this is the Golden Age of "Sex and the City" - after all, this is the beginning of Carrie's relationship with Aidan, and more importantly, the Aidan/Big duality which dominates Carrie's personality and may, in fact, essentially symbolize women's relationship to the male race. When people think about "Sex and the City," I would venture to assume that they aren't thinking about the later seasons, when everyone is in long-term relationships and everyone has health problems and Baryshnikov tries acting; nor, for that matter, are they thinking about the early seasons, when Carrie talked to the camera but almost never mentioned shoes.
All TV shows that last several seasons, especially those which can be said to change the face of television, are really radically different within themselves. Usually, they're at least three different pieces, loosely but obviously divided across the show's run. The first season of "Sopranos" is completely different from the last season of "Sopranos" - the whole visual look of the show has changed into something more noirish, half of the supporting cast is dead, Anthony Jr. is a main character, no one ever has any fun, and Tony has become the villain. "Lost" is also miles away in season 4 than where it was in season 1 - in its primary narrative and thematic concerns, in its main characters (how could the show last so long without Ben?), in the length of its seasons and the level of production design. Even "Entourage," an ode to SoCal decadence, has become radically different in scope - less about Hollywood glamour and more about Hollywood business.
Yet still, we consider a TV show to be a single work, and when we think about the show in abstract, I would argue there is some precise period in the show's history which we consider. And this is it, right here, the vague eternal moment we talk about when we talk about "Sex and the City," the exact point when the show was equally funny and serious, equally about long-term relationships and one-night stands, equally focused on the women's relationship with their men and their relationship with each other. The show was occasionally better, but it was ever quite as perfect again.
This is, after all, the season in which Carrie asks "Are We Sluts?" That question (which is also the title of that great episode) is never quite answered by Carrie, and it's rarely repeated when people talk about the show, which is ironic, since most of the columns which criticize "Sex and the City" (especially ones like this, which draw comparisons or contrasts between the show and the fall of Hillary Clinton) are basically dancing around an answer: Yes You Are.
Are they sluts? That's a loaded word - like bitch or cocktease or whore or the c-word, you can make the argument that, because there's no similar derogatory term for men, the word is patently unfair, and should not be used in reference to anyone. Several vague statistics were thrown around the talkosphere after the Sex and the City Movie came out, to the effect that, although Carrie, Samantha, Miranda, and Charlotte sleep with more men in the show's run than the average American female, they sleep with the exact average amount of men for a New York woman. (Which doesn't really change the question - fundamentalist preachers and investment bankers would argue that that just proves that ALL New York Women are sluts.)
This all brings us back to the question - what is the male version of the show? The usual shorthand is to point to shows about a group of male friends having and talking about sex - "Queer as Folk," "Big Shots," and most specifically, "Entourage." After all, "Entourage" is basically the great American young male wet dream - hanging out, smoking weed, playing video games on a bigscreen projector, getting bottle service in clubs, hooking up with Mandy Moore, and best of all, getting to call it all Work.
Certainly, "Entourage" has been as much an essential Los Angeles monument as "Sex" was for New York; certainly, the interplay of the four friends on that other show seems to mirror the interplay of the four friends on this one. Vince is Carrie, the head of the group and the face of the show, who's also the least interesting character played by the least talented performer; Eric is Miranda, the most realistic character with an actual job and realistic relationship troubles, played with rueful sarcasm by the most subtle and poker-faced actor; Johnny Drama is Charlotte, lovably old-fashioned and lusting for an impossible dream (fame for Drama, true love for Charlotte); Turtle is Samantha, the extreme personification of the show's already extreme treatment of its respective gender (he: chubby, stoned, freeloading, unshaven, talks like he's listened to too much hip-hop; she: thin, fashionable, independent, endlessly sexual, refusing to age past 35.)
But the comparison doesn't quite hold. "Sex and the City" focuses its eye closely on every new man who comes into each girls' life, even if it's only to explore one particular detail; the women on "Entourage" are essentially the same hot early-20s model wannabes, except for those rare occasions when they're actually models. The relationships on "Sex and the City" are all about flirtation, where most of the relationships on "Entourage" skip straight to the sex. More generally, "Sex and the City" asks big questions - about gender, about city life, about modern day America - where "Entourage" lives in a zone of blissful ignorance. You could argue that it's precisely these differences that makes it "the male Sex and the City," just as you could argue that those differences make it "The West Coast Sex and the City."
In the middle of the third season of "Sex and the City," the whole gang goes to Los Angeles. They hang out at wild parties and meet famous Hollywood actors playing themselves (Matthew McConaughey) and playing other people (Vince Vaughn as a Hollywood douche, Sarah Michelle Gellar as a Hollywood douchette). Everyone they meet is incredibly good looking. They even go to the Playboy Mansion. Is it any coincidence that this is basically sums up "Entourage?" And it is another coincidence that these are the worst two episodes of the entire series?
Still, beyond the content of the shows, I think they're drastically different in the nature of their evolution. The first season of "Entourage," and especially the second one, is all about lovable decadence - it's not really about anything, and there's never really any major tension (both season finales hint at tension - will the group be broken up? - only to break that tension after a few moments, setting everything back to right.) Oddly enough, as the show become more dramatically intensive - with the ongoing Medellin plotline, with failure for the characters - it became less interesting, as if somehow the whole genius of the show was in its pop escapist vision of a world without consequence. It evolved as a show, but the phenomenon ended.
In Season 3, "Sex and the City" takes a similar move, becoming more dramatically intensive and moving away from the relatively flighty narratives of the first season. Season 3 truly starts to test the nature of the show: Charlotte gets married, the beginning of the end for the show's sexy-singles phase; Samantha and Charlotte quarrel, briefly breaking apart the friendship circle; Samantha gets sick, the first time we've ever seen her demonstrate any real weakness and the first time she ever seems to consider the disadvantages of singlehood; and, most importantly, Carrie sleeps with Big, cheating on Aidan, at the exact moment when everything in her life seems to be perfect.
"Sex and the City" had to evolve to become a true phenomenon, because after Carrie's affair with Big, the show gained an added heft, and a whiff of danger. The glam fashion-show image that tends to be propagated by the media doesn't quite do the show justice; nor, conversely, does the sexual-anthropological-analytical concept (Sex Columnist Debates Modern Female Issues) really get to the core of why the show is a true epic narrative, and not just a fuck-of-the-week. When Carrie sleeps with Big - doing it dirty, first in an elevator, and then in the bedroom, and then lazily smoking tobacco just before the credits roll - she becomes, briefly but effectively, her own show's villain.
This plotline is the show's greatest argument for itself, and also against itself - for once, Carrie's analytical mind (the invisible narrator, the columnist whose columns we never see) is not given the last word. I suspect this is because this is one of the few times that Carrie, or anyone on the show, does something truly dangerous, and sinful, and unforgivable, and yet also touchingly human. This is the first time that Cheating will play a major role in an ongoing plot arc - and considering how little screen time is devoted to Charlotte's dalliance with a gardener and Samantha's uncomfortable top-floor bonus screw with Richard, you could make the argument that this is truly the one Cheating Plot in the show's history. With the Carrie-Aidan-Big plotline, the show didn't just nail modern gender politics - it found a way to question our own preconceptions of the show and the show's initial concept.
I know many people who can't stand Carrie. I can't decide if that's because they don't like her as a character or as a person - that is, if they can't stand her for who she is or for what she does. True, she's a whiner, and so painfully into fashion as to basically ruin her bank account, and in later seasons she's got the most utterly painful habit of talking in cutesy black talk (we get our first taste of this quirk in the season 3 finale, in an exchange with trannie hookers.) All of that is why most men hate her. But she also makes poor decisions, and dates the wrong men, and complains to them without every really solving anything. That's why most women hate her - but only as friends hate friends who do stupid things. In fact, I don't think it's wrong to say that although all the girls on the show make bad decisions often, Carrie makes the worst decisions constantly.
The thing is, Carrie is a writer. Although we never actually get a look at her column, we can extrapolate that it is largely autobiographical. Her voiceover narration often bleeds into the writing; once her book is published, Mr. Big teasingly asks for his own name; at the beginning of season 3, her affair with a politico gets an anonymous tell-all, with the awful title "To Pee or Not to Pee." So she writes about herself and her mistakes constantly, and despite the fact that the end of each show is structured as an epiphany, she essentially learns nothing. She continues to make the same mistakes, in fact, makes even worse mistakes the further she goes (the downward trend from Aidan/Big to greedy ineffectual Berger and finally to the remote Aleksander is fine evidence of that.)
We should not forget that the entirety of "Sex and the City" is set many years after the golden age of these womens' lives. They are no longer in their twenties; it is a long time since sex, or even romance, was something new and unique; their bodies are beginning to fail them, in small ways (cellulite) and in large ways (infertility.) This shines a weird ironic light on all those college girls who idolize "Sex and the City," since the characters on the show hate college girls. (There's a great episode later in the series when Samantha hosts a party for an adolescent socialite who drinks, smokes, and fucks; the result plays like a pre-satire of "Gossip Girl," except played more realistic than anything on that other glam New York show.) The essential themes of "Sex and the City" are loneliness, frustration, confusion, and awkwardness. Girl power!
This is why, beginning with season 3, the real "male version" of "Sex and the City" becomes, undoubtedly, "The Sopranos." (Preface: It's true that "Sopranos" had its share of main female characters, but the show was always focused on a man's world. Notice how, whenever a woman tries to stand against the preconceptions of the mob men and of the show itself, the male hierarchy forces her back in - Adriana gets killed, Melfi gets raped first by a man and then by the system, Carmela tries to divorce Tony but gets trapped by him at every turn. Even Angie Bonpensiero gets absorbed - in season 2, she's talking about leaving her deadbeat husband; by season 6, she's "one of the boys.")
On one level, the two shows shared a basic thematic characteristic - they were all about analysis, and specifically, a pointed analysis of modern gender roles. "The Sopranos," for most of its run, got its main power and focus from the scenes between Tony Soprano and his psychiatrist, Dr. Melfi. Their ongoing dialogue put everything else on the show under microscopic examination - Tony's relationships, Tony's work, Tony's self-image, Tony's dreams. Those scenes were the gateway towards the show's dissection of modern America, and you can learn nearly everything you have to know about contemporary manhood from six and a half seasons of "The Sopranos." In season 1, Tony wonders, "What happened to Gary Cooper?" as he considers the sad state of his own medicated, manic depressive generation; by season 6, he's admitting, "I hate my son," when he considers the overstimulated, intellectually undernourished, lazy generation represented by his son.
True, Carrie only goes to see a psychiatrist once, but I would argue that, where Tony requires a a (female) psychiatrist as a medium in order to examine himself, Carrie needs only her Apple Computer. Those scenes of her, alone in her room smoking a cigarette, while Narrator-Carrie rhapsodizes on the soundtrack, serve the same function as the Dr. Melfi scenes - they take you, briefly, one step back from the show, into the MST3K-style audience, to consider, well, what it all means.
The two shows come to radically different conclusions about "what it all means," but they follow remarkable similar avenues for getting there. Both shows improved throughout their entire run, until a certain point (probably season 5 of "Sex" and season 6 of "Sopranos") where the shows became steadily more intelligent but also steadily darker, and weirder, and much less fun. Season 6 of Sopranos features an endless amount of funerals; by the end of the show, there's scarcely anyone left of the old gang. Similarly, by the end of "Sex and the City," the show has morphed completely from a show about single women to a show about women in relationships (two are even married!)
This is a natural progression, and for TV it is a decidedly modern one (nothing ever really changed in 20 years of "Gunsmoke"), but it also makes both shows far more difficult to like. Just as it's easier to enjoy "Sex" when it's all glam and one-night stands, it's easier to like "Sopranos" when it's all guns and fights and drugs. Yet the endings of "Sex" and "Sopranos" could not be more different - the modern-fairy-tale ending of Big and Carrie is miles removed from the ambiguous, bleak ending of "Sopranos" (which isn't, technically, an ending at all.)
Of course, there's an important difference between "Sopranos" and "Sex and the City," although I think it may say more about the difference between women and men than between the two shows' styles. Tony's analysis on "Sopranos" circles endlessly around his parents - first his mother's horrible emotional abuse, and then his father's even more horrible moral abuse. It's an openly Catholic notion - sins of the father, original sin, dicks dicks dicks. So much weight is given on the show to where people have come from - the interlocking family relations match the importance of "family" in the real-life and movie mob.
On "Sex," conversely, Carrie only mentions her father once. It's in season 4, when she starts working at Vogue, and reveals to a man her father's age that her dad left when she was only 5. This is thrown out at the end of season 4, and I've read at least on review that calls this as a left-field revelation, but it's not handled that way, really.
After 7 seasons of the show, it's remarkable how little we know about any of the girls and their lives before 1999. Miranda's mom dies so quickly that they didn't even hire an actress to play her; we never catch a whiff of Charlotte's or Samantha's parents (perhaps they were born at the beginning of the creation and split in two, yin and yang, slut and prom queen.) We get occasional tidbits of background - Samantha lost her virginity when she was 12, Charlotte was in Kappa Kappa Gamma and rode horses- but those tidbits merely confirm what we'd already expected.
What I'm saying is that, for these characters, for their lives in New York, their past simply doesn't matter. This is a show with its focus entirely on the present; and it is also a show with a profound understanding of its own bullshit. It is telling, I think, that Carrie decides that going to a psychiatrist is not for her after one episode, EVEN THOUGH her psychiatrist was right; comparatively, Tony Soprano spends seven years hating psychiatry, often leaving or threatening to leave (or threatening his psychiatrist), before finally pleading, when Melfi kicks him out, "We're making progress!"
So perhaps when we are talking about the show's feminine quality, we are talking about it's uniquely feminine strength - the way in which disappointments are conquered, and sins are forgiven, and cancer itself fades away over the coffee table with friends.
And so perhaps the "male version" of "Sex and the City" is a show with the exact opposite quality - uniquely male weakness - in which the sins of the past, and particularly the sins commissioned by parents upon their children, are revisited over and over again in the present, with the implication that the future will never be any better. Whereas "Sex and the City" has the quality of constantly starting over - a new column, a new man, a new chance to find love, a new apartment in the Meatpacking district, a new marriage for Charlotte, new shoes for Carrie, a new guest appearance by Miranda's Steve - this other show would have the quality of endless repetition, of fighting the same battles. Like "Sex," this show would also be essentially analytical, attempting to discover some essential "truth" (with any number of tertiary truths along the way) - but unlike on "Sex," where the women are ultimately as confused as ever, this show would focus, fetishistically, like Oedipus, on the search for that truth, and it would keep going, no matter that every new answer resulted in a hundred other questions.
And whereas "Sex" is set in the modern city - New York in the new millenium, with a truly infinite array of relationships to form and social circles to navigate - this male "Sex" would strip down its worldview to primordial society, away from the thousand distractions. A world where men can be men, where the individual reigns supreme, where everyone starts out equally and can become King. Unlike "Sex," there would be considerable eye candy - in fact, the eye candy would be the protagonists - but also unlike "Sex," there would be precious little actual Sex. Just as "Sex" evolves, in its run, from focusing on the women's relationships with men to focusing on their relationships with each other, this other would would steadily focus in on its male characters, and their fathers, and the games they play with each other.
At the very beginning of season 3, Carrie and friends stare at Manhattan from the Staten Island Ferry. Someone says, "Who would've thought that an island that tiny would be big enough to hold all of our old boyfriends?"
Is "Lost" the male version of "Sex and the City?"
1 comment:
I think you mean that E is Miranda.
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