And Just Like That

A bleak reminder of the inevitable passage of time

Sex and the City was wildly unrealistic. Unless you’re wealthy, don’t work, and are a chronically alcoholic at least average-sized man, you can’t drink cocktails all day in swanky restaurants and bars.

Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) is 5’3” (and that’s being generous) and about 90 pounds. She would be demented, raving, and probably dead within a few months. NYC was much more violent and crime ridden in the nineties, so if the booze didn’t get her, a mugger would.

Carrie Bradshaw’s apartment would have cost $2000.00 a month in 1998. The real life brownstone that posed as the outside of her building just sold for almost $13 million. If she was really living in a rent controlled apartment in that location for $750.00 a month, she would have been at constant war with her landlord.

A woman I know lives on the LES in a rent controlled apartment. The floor of her apartment is dirt. She refuses to move and her landlord refuses to do any repairs. The sink in her bathroom hasn’t worked in over a decade, half the power sockets are busted, and she refuses to fix them or allow any of her friends to because it’s a matter of principle and the landlord should do it.

Carrie Bradshaw is based on a real-life columnist who earned $5000.00 a month writing for Vogue. After taxes, that’s $3800 a month. Even granting her rent is magically $750.00 a month, her utilities would have been $60.00 a month without cable or an air conditioner, and she’d be blowing at least $100.00 a day on drinks and eating out. That leaves her with negative $10.00 a month before cabs, shopping, laundry, dry cleaning, groceries, payment into her group health insurance, and deductibles.

Again, this is being extremely generous, as NYC is designed to separate you from your money. When I first moved her in the late nineties, I’d go to a dive bar, eat a few slices of pizza, and somehow spend over $100.00.

These resurrected skeletons are more financially realistic in And Just Like That, but the lifestyle is even more untenable.

Samantha isn’t in London, she’s dead. A combination of cirrhosis and STDs finally got her.

As for the others, after 27 years of heavy drinking, their bones are about as brittle as paper mache. Unless these bitches are drinking nothing but White Russians, they’d end up in the hospital every time they stubbed a toe. If they bumped into someone by accident on the sidewalk, they’d immediately be reduced to ash.

At the very least, they’d wake up in their homes covered in vomit with mysterious injuries. One of them would have definitely shattered a hip by now.

Why do I know anything about these shows?

I used to have girlfriends who forced me to watch Sex in The City, and I kept my mouth shut. I’d watch whatever they wanted, as I could phase out and didn’t care. All I asked for in return was the World Series, and they complained until they saw Derek Jeter and suddenly baseball was tolerable.

I liked playing baseball but think watching it is either boring as hell or stressful, and Jeter made me more insecure than Carrie Brashaw made them, and with good reason.

Jeter is only a year older than me, he’s 6’3”, and he won his first World Series while I was flunking half of my classes in college. The ladies in Sex and The City were/are considerably older, and my girlfriends during those years were more attractive than them. They weren’t competing against a real life champion six inches taller than them and much more diplomatically savvy. One ex-girlfriend called him “Mr. Perfect.”

Samantha was the most realistic. I’ve met old warhorses like her, she’s sexy, and she looks like she could lift a five pound dumbbell. In real life, none of them are taller than 5’6”, but Samantha and Charlotte looked relatively sturdy. Miranda looks like she has Irish/Northern European blood, so I could buy her being a drunk, but not quite as functional.

Carrie Bradshaw might be taken out by a strong breeze.

I understand suspension of disbelief, but it’s more difficult to accept in a supposedly real life context. You watch Lord of the Rings or Star Wars or Superman, you’re in a fantasy world and you roll with it and still maybe hate it.

Watch a show about life in the city, and the seemingly mundane—like a 90 pound woman drinking four cocktails with lunch without getting hammered or any ill effects—is harder to swallow.

And Just Like That is like an Old Timer’s Game, except delusional. The last Old Timer’s Game at Yankee Stadium was cancelled because of rain, and every player who was asked said they were relieved. Even Jeter said he didn’t want to go out there and embarrass himself.

The numbers for And Just Like That indicate the IP still has value, but viewership is declining. I smell another reboot coming, and I’d love to write it. Maybe a bit less Carrie Bradshaw and a little more Travis Bickle. Maybe a young reporter who starts at the New York Times for $50,000.00 a year (that’s currently the real starting salary) who’s poached by FOX for $80,000.00.

That would be a drunk I could believe in.