The short answer is no, by the way. You can click out of this article now.
I’m kidding but seriously?
We don’t need a revival of these kinds of shows, especially ones that were female-centered. It will never be the #GirlBoss move these studios and streaming services are constantly trying to push to female audiences…the same female audiences have found empowerment already in modern shows and movies.
I’m mainly triggered by the news of ‘Sex and the City’ revival, sans sex-positive fiend Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall). Let me state for the record that I love SATC and its undeniable impact on pop culture. SATC was the critical and cult classic hit that put HBO on the map before the Sopranos came along and kept the talent ball rolling. SATC is revolutionary for the stories it told about the relationships between women and men (though all being on the focus of cishet rich white women in the ever diverse city of New York). As much as I and many others critique the show for its issues, we can all identify bits of ourselves in these characters. Each of the women in SATC represented the ideal of the modern woman. As the audience, we could feel the mistakes and consequences of them throughout these characters’ journeys. The show humanized women in a way that was rare in commercial media.
Though I love SATC and tend to rewatch it at least once a year, it has aged poorly. The show is every phobic you can think of and slapping a few POC and queer folks in a revival will not fix the violence it enacted on marginalized communities while on air.
Taking content from the 2000s and putting it in the scope of the 2020s is a massive backpedal, especially since that content moves differently from what we are seeing on the air today. To repeat a point, four cishet rich white women are at the center of SATC in the most diverse city in the states, and we rarely see any people of color/queer folks, and when we do, it’s playing off harmful, negative stereotypes. The two mediocre follow up movies for SATC prove that the show does not know how to operate in the modern world.
There hasn’t been a single revival that has given what it was supposed to give in terms of satisfying modern audiences. ‘Charmed’ (2019), ‘The Craft: Legacy’, ‘Girl Meets World’ and ‘Gilmore Girls’ (2016) are all examples of reboots, continuations, and revivals that fall flat in delivering a well-rounded follow-up to a beloved piece of pop culture. I notice that many of these revivals are all female-led (sometimes race bend female-led) and have women producers and directors behind the screen but have heavy studio involvement. Let these amazing, talented women create and star in content that is not contained in the inescapable shell of appealing to millennials’ nostalgia.
Quit making nostalgia from the 1990s and early 2000s a personality to commercial media. That content has not sat in the vault long enough for us to forget watching it in real-time on air. We do not want half attempts of rewriting problematic takes on what womanhood is. We want fresh points of views on all kinds of women and their journeys. In a world where we have ‘I May Destroy You’, ‘The Queen’s Gambit’, ‘Betty’, ‘Normal People’, and ‘Pose’, there is no need for the revivals of shows that have already cemented their importance to represent women in media.
