Please, PLEASE don’t ruin our Sex And The City memories with another terrible movie.

It’s time for a sequel intervention, to save something very special.

I’m going to start crowd-funding for something very important. Because surely I can pay SOMEONE to stop this car-crash from happening?

Who needs to be convinced that this is one Very Bad Idea? What strange deal with the devil do we need to make sure that schedules stay tangled, salary disputes are never resolved and personal differences remain angst-filled?

Because there can never be another Sex And The City movie. Never. Ever. Ever.

Sarah Jessica Parker posted this photo today, accompanied by the text:

“Well. I guess the cat’s out of the (little brown) bag. As usual, we will keep you posted on every detail as we are able. I’m under strict gag order until then. Xx, Sj.” 

The result was that she sent the Internet into a frenzy of speculation that Sex And The City 3 is in the works. And I simultaneously sent up a tiny prayer to the Movie Gods – ‘Please, let SJP be talking about her shoe collection. PLEASE.’

You see, once upon a time (as Carrie might write), Sex And The City was my all.

It’s hard to overstate how much, for women of a certain type, and a certain age, that television show Changed Everything. How we worshipped at its (yes, well-shod) shoes. How precious and holy it was to us.

Carrie. And yes, clothes. Post continues after this collection of truly epic outfits.

It’s difficult to express, in a world where Girls jostles with Amy Schumer and Broad City, how fricking delighted women of the 90s and noughties were to have those four fictional female characters, Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda, saying those words from those extraordinary scripts on our televisions every week.

Oh, how we loved those women.

Women who dated, and fucked, and drank, and swore.

Women who had interesting jobs, and lived alone, who cheated and got cheated on, who broke hearts and had theirs broken.

Women who didn’t have children. Or had them alone. Women who had miscarriages, and abortions.

Women who married and divorced and got sick and got better and who lived full lives, not just fragments of a life seen through the filter of a man.

Women who were not girls.

WATCH: The bit where Carrie realises there are simple girls, and c-c-curly girls.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGL1fJEtHWk

Like most of my contemporaries, I owned every season of that gloriously ground-breaking television show and I would binge-watch them before that was even A Thing.

I have memories of spending days in a post-breakup funk, working my way through box set after box-set in my share-house bedroom, hoping that by some strange miracle, I would find an episode I had never seen before. It never happened. I kept watching.

The men of Sex And The City were always bit-players to the women. Post continues after this very pleasing gallery:

There were lessons I learned from Sex And The City that I find myself teaching the Young People. Or at least I would, if they hadn’t already watched them all, too:

– Sometimes, he’s just not that into you. And it’s okay.

– Sometimes, you have excellent sex with people you don’t even like. And average sex with people you adore.

– Sometimes, your friends can’t stand the guy you’re madly in love with. And they’re almost always right.

– Sometimes, your friends aren’t going to approve of your decisions. And that’s okay. A good friend will love you all the same.

– Raw food is certainly bullshit.

For me, Sex And The City was never only about the fashion. That was a beautiful distraction, a wonderful spectacle, but the idea of that TV show being about labels and money, materialism and shopping never occurred to me. It was a glorious fantasy.

And then they made the first film.

I remember being so excited to be reunited with those women in the first scene that I cheered, along with the rest of the crowd – all  girlfriends, desperately projecting onto that screen all the love they felt for their BFFs.

But it was bad. It was bad because it was about “labels and love”, and Samantha getting “fat”, and Carrie getting swept up in a princess-bride fantasy that ultimately saw her blame herself when a man shat all over her in public.

But I, like millions of others,  forgave them for that. Because, far out, I was just pleased to see those women again.

And then. Then they made the second movie.

And it was so terrible, so God-awfully appalling that it was almost impossible to imagine how it ever left the writing room and made it all the way to my suburban movie theatre. Hard to think that it had passed through the hands of so many of the talented, brilliant, original thinkers who were involved in the TV show.

That movie managed to be deeply offensive to all women over 4o. It managed to be deeply offensive to women without children, and to mothers. It had a hollow heart, obsessing over the luxury of a random, Middle Eastern holiday and casually tossing idiotic stereotypes over its shoulder as as it went.

It was insulting to our intelligence, and it trashed the memory of our TV heroines, once so fabulously complex and bold. They were now 40-plus, apparently obsessed with still trying to look 20-plus, and wracked with insecurities and doubt.

Sex And The City was done.

In general, we are terrible at letting things go. If we like something, we want 15 sequels, and 25 series of everything, and then we complain when the magic is lost.

The point about magic is that it is fleeting. Sex And The City was a defining, Generation X triumph. The early episodes of that show would still be surprising it they were shown in primetime tonight.

Somewhere in the move to the ‘big screen’ that magic morphed into vacuous trash that is best forgotten.

Please, let Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte just be. Please, let SJP be talking about her shoe collection.

Do you want them to make Sex And The City 3?

Just for kicks, relive the moment when Charlotte falls in love with a vibrator:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQYDZiqKh_s