And just like that, wokeness has ruined another once-popular Hollywood franchise.
HBO Max’s Sex and the City reboot — titled And Just Like That — is getting savaged by mainstream TV critics who have concluded the new series’ embrace of wokeness is not a good thing. Some have found the show’s virtue signaling to be “exhausting,” while others said it “felt more self-serving than self-aware.”
One critic even compared watching the new show to reading Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Anti-Racist.
Many seemed to agree that the show badly needs actress Kim Cattrall, who played sexual libertine Samantha Jones in the original HBO series. Her absence throws the ensemble off balance and casts a long shadow over the new storyline, as does the surprise death of a major character in the first episode.
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And Just Like That aims to address revisionist criticism that Sex and the City was too white. The new cast features four minority actresses, including gender non-binary Broadway star Sara Ramirez, who reportedly has a five minute scene in which the character delivers a lecture on the lack of representation of gender non-conforming characters in TV.
EW‘s critic concluded the show “tries too hard to bring its cultural brand into a new era.” It’s also “a sweaty enterprise, stretching to include vast political sensitivities in a way that feels more self-serving than self-aware. I miss Samantha, man, and I miss how Kim Cattrall was the last SATC star willing to look utterly ridiculous.”
Indiewire’s critic said “all this virtue signaling can be exhausting,” as the show’s new minority characters “spend most of their time onscreen reassuring our main cast that they’re not being racist.”
The New York Times blasted the show’s efforts at wokeness as “cringey” and “painful.” With its self-conscious attempts at racial sensitivity, “the whole production feels as if it speed-read How to Be an Antiracist in June 2020.”
Rolling Stone also panned the series, saying the series’ “attempts at wokeness… are so often self-conscious and clumsy.” The show’s minority characters “are mostly being viewed through the eyes of the returning characters, rather than as people with their own inner lives.”
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