The first rule of rewriting a beloved series should be, don’t upset your core audience, which happens to include investigative journalists, because all your stupidity will be exposed. The writers of the Sex and the City reboot, And Just Like That, failed so spectacularly to bring back the popular franchise that even left-leaning fans hate the woke-scolding nature of what the writers have done. It’s really quite amazing how this show is bringing the women of the country together in a united front against HBO Max and the insufferable hatchet job they’ve done to a beloved franchise. And Just Like That is to its fans what the Star Wars reboots, prequels, sequels, and every other money-grabbing stupidity that hit that franchise was to Star Wars fans. The nuclear bomb HBO dropped on us is going to reverberate for many years. This epic fail will be remembered in female fandom as every bit as teeth-grinding as the indignities that long-suffering Star Wars aficionados have been through.
Here’s a wonderful observation from one of my YouTube viewers:
You know, I’m a black woman in her forties who watched satc in the early 2000s and I didn’t really mind the non-existence of black characters in the series. it was a kind of escapism while doing laundry or cooking. I had fun following the lives of four rich white women who had nothing to do with my universe. That was the joke. The fact that the series never looked deeply into racial and gender issues made me feel, for half an hour, like a normal person and forget for a moment about racism in my real life. To analyze such questions, I turned to other programs or books. Not everything has to be about racism, gender issues, age, etc, etc, all the time. Sometimes it’s good to enjoy futility sitting on the couch without any guilt and that’s what satc provided for most of its target audience.
Look at me uniting people who despise wokism! This is the unity we’ve been waiting for.
I will not be shamed into silence because some of you think the show I liked was stupid or bad. Those of you in the comments section who ride high on your conservative horses, declaring that we should all withdraw from the culture you despise because principles or something, need to skip past this article — or stay and learn why withdrawing equals failure. The great Andrew Breitbart famously opined that politics is downstream from culture. It’s why he launched Big Hollywood: to report on all things related to culture and entertainment from a conservative viewpoint. Conservatives long ago abandoned popular culture to the left, and it was a huge mistake.
If you walk away from entertainment and do not engage, you leave all of the influence to the wokescolds who will kill it, gut it, stuff it and hang it on the wall to taunt you. And then this bastardized entertainment flows directly into your home, corrupting everything it touches. It doesn’t matter if you don’t let your kids watch television. The kids they’re surrounded with do, and the morality you so crave is being erased through this entertainment all day long. It will affect you whether you watch it or not.
It will never get better, and great stories with virtuous characters will never be told, because you retreat; because you refuse to join the fray and put pressure on the culprits who are doing it. It’s the same reason we should never abandon public schools to the left. What does that accomplish other than losing one more institution to people who hate you? Instead, run the current school board out of town and replace them with people who think like you. That’s what the left does. They’ve replaced every single person in Hollywood (including even the old liberals from yesteryear) with super-woke Millennial social justice warriors who have an ax to grind with white people, beauty, truth, fun, and comedy because they were told they did by communist professors bent on destroying American culture. If we refuse to call it out because we’re too good to even be aware of what’s happening culturally, then we concede the most important battleground there is. Way to go, losers.
Enough. Stop judging my television habits. That’s not what this is about. It is about stopping the radical left from tearing down every statue erected to our cultural past. They’ve moved on from statues of confederate soldiers to figurative statues of American entertainment culture like Seinfeld, Star Wars, Friends, and now Sex and the City. It will not be a great leap before they move on to destroying what you love. These classic shows are now “problematic” to ivy leaguers who were in diapers when we were all enjoying them.
Related: Help! I May Need Therapy For What the ‘Sex And The City’ Reboot Is Doing to Me
And speaking of diapers, I have discovered, through a deep dive into the writer’s room of And Just Like That, who the real problematic person is: Samantha Irby.
Meet #SamanthaIrby writer on #andjustlikethat self-described fat, queer, bisexual, IBS sufferer who wears diapers on dates and writes about "depression, anxiety, and chronic illness" and has never had a successful relationship with a man. It all makes sense now. pic.twitter.com/byLH3nYgqv
— No, not THAT Megan Fox 🦊 (@MeganFoxWriter) January 16, 2022
Samantha Irby is a self-described mentally ill, fat, queer, bisexual with irritable bowel syndrome who writes about “depression and chronic illness and anxiety” in grotesque detail. This is the deeply unhappy person that HBO Max decided should write the reboot of a series that featured four white, straight, beautiful, thin, glamorous, successful, healthy women. Are you kidding me?
But Irby says that her fundamental worldview is the same: “I’m always going to be that person who can look at a beautiful day, and tell you everything that’s wrong with it.”
Irby came by that unshakable pessimism honestly. In high school, she was the girl who lived in Section 8 housing and took care of her disabled mother while her classmates went on vacations. As a nascent adult fumbling toward maturity, Irby struggled with depression and degenerative arthritis while everyone else was Instagramming their yoga classes. Now she’s just a different kind of outcast: the only black woman at the mommy book club.
There are a plethora of sources to find Irby talking and talking about all of her deficiencies because she’s petted and celebrated by the woke left for being so “honest” about gross topics like wearing a diaper on a date. (No, really.) This is the type of person that the elitists running popular culture want you to revere. She is written about in the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, and scores of other magazines pushing her mediocre work on the populace. And yet, she doesn’t sell many books. In an interview with Rebellious Magazine, she admits to having poor sales of her book, which was called a “bestseller” and was written about and pushed onto the public nonstop.
But when you’re selling books in the thousands, as opposed to the hundreds of thousands or the millions, a lot of what you get in return is bragging rights and nice clippings for the scrapbook. Like, I didn’t get a guaranteed NFL contract, I wrote a book that a lot of people are gonna check out of the library or pass around their group of friends.
Sounds riveting. And here’s Cynthia Nixon reading it on the train and calling it “sensational.”
An excerpt from this book describes perfectly the difference between Irby’s idea of a night out on the town and the classic SATC version (which would never include an ill-fitting dress or tacos in your purse).
This is what she turned our glamorous characters on #SATC into. Her. Awkward, ugly, stumbling, gross, and desperate pic.twitter.com/OkIELFIUTe
— No, not THAT Megan Fox 🦊 (@MeganFoxWriter) January 16, 2022
I am squeezed into my push-up bra and sparkly, ill-fitting dress. I’ve got the requisite sixteen coats of waterproof mascara, black eyeliner, and salmon-colored streaks of hastily applied self-tanner drying down the side of my neck. I’m sucking in my stomach, I’ve taken thirty-seven Imodium in case my irritable bowels have an adverse reaction to the bag of tacos I hid in my purse and ate in the bathroom while no one was looking…”
The research I did on Irby shows the major issue with her viewpoint that has ruined the SATC legacy. (And yes, it’s Irby’s writing that does not use capital letters or correct punctuation. Her editor must hate her.) David Reddish of Queerty was sent excerpts from Irby’s “newsletter,” which she sends to fans without correcting any of her many grammatical errors.
“the title change signifies a show that isn’t about the big things that make life glamorous, but rather the way that life hits you the struggle to exist and remain relevant as culture, friends, love, and life passes by. the only thing that remains constant for the show’s three heroines is an onslaught of indignities. what is and just like that if not the humiliation of life persevering?
What show is she talking about? Certainly not SATC. If HBO wanted to make a show about four women who failed at life and became irrelevant, awkward, sad and depressed, surely they could have written a new show and even hired Irby to write it — she would be the obvious choice to write stuff that will depress the hell out of you. But SATC was never about women who were humiliated at every turn or had life pass them by. And HBO should know that, after two years in a COVID depression, the last thing anyone wants to tune into is a depressing take on a once funny and entertaining show.
The newsletter went on to say that Irby knows the fans hate the show and she wants everyone to stop criticizing her because — wait for it — she’s getting “death threats.” I think we all know, from the experience we’ve had with other leftists claiming they’re being threatened, that it is rarely true. Pics and video or it didn’t happen (and even then we are going to need proof you didn’t stage it yourself with a pair of Nigerian tricksters). Irby did not give any evidence of threats but is attempting to turn herself into the victim, instead of the show she killed and the fans she traumatized. In classic SJW style, she’s the real victim here.
i took some protective measures (that some of my friends roasted me for at the time) like getting the f*ck off twitter forever and unfollowing whatever pop culture sh*t i was scrolling past every day to shield my sensitive eyeballs from things that might wound them, but i was not prepared to receive death threats over a fictional character’s fictional relationship choices that are fictional which means not real?
Irby’s work is not my cup of tea, but I understand that there is an audience for her shtick. She writes for the social reject, the fat, the awkward, the lonely, and the sick. There’s an audience there, and if she can write for them and create content they like then good for her. She had success writing for “Shrill” on Hulu about a fat girl struggling through life. It makes sense that Irby would be a good fit for the kind of show that highlights her own struggles. But SATC was never about socially awkward and ugly people commiserating about how hard they have it.
Each one of the characters was a fantasy of successful, powerful, beautiful, wealthy, and fabulous womanhood who rarely struggled with anything more difficult than which designer dress to wear to the next great party. Later on in the series, Samantha Jones faces cancer and Charlotte struggles with infertility. Both serious issues were written in a way that made the audience cheer.
Who could forget Sam ripping off her wig (which was making her sweat) during a breast cancer fundraiser and shouting “F*ck it!” into the microphone. “It’s bad enough I lose my hair — now I have my face running down onto my couture. Oh, the hell with it!” Now that was how you write about someone suffering from something they can’t control. Sam would never wallow in the misery and graphic horror of what illness can do because she wasn’t her illness. She was Samantha Jones, a badass bitch who didn’t take crap from anyone including cancer. Every woman wants to be a Sam Jones when confronted with life’s horrors.
And Charlotte suffered a devastating miscarriage but pulled herself off the couch and dolled herself up — taking a lesson from Elizabeth Taylor on how to face a crisis like a powerful woman — looking like she stepped off the cover of a magazine and cat walking bravely back into the fray. These are the women we remember who would never willingly submit themselves to humiliation. They kicked humiliation in the face and then went to brunch.
For Our VIP Subscribers: And Just Like That, Here’s Everything Wrong With the ‘Sex and the City’ Reboot
But Irby’s whole life is a humiliation. It doesn’t appear she’s had any experience with being triumphant despite struggling, but instead, she has made a career out of exposing her struggles and forcing the reader to feel her pain. She is an experiential writer; she writes from her personal experience, which is what writers should do. When you try to write a character you have no frame of reference for, chances are it’s going to come out less than authentic. And that’s the main issue everyone is having with AJLT. All of these well-known and understood characters who were firmly established over many years are suddenly written as totally different people who have lost their identities, their relationships, and their take-no-prisoners personalities. The reason is that the writer hired to bring them back to life has no idea how to write women who aren’t social rejects.
Irby despises attractive people and men, which she admits in multiple publicly available articles that I go over in great detail in the YouTube video below. Yet, she’s the one who HBO hired to write characters who love men. The people responsible for the murder of SATC are the people who told Samantha Irby she was capable of writing for this franchise, and they should all be fired, if not arrested, and locked away somewhere they can’t harm American culture like this ever again.
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