Under this narrative umbrella, Miranda dates a modelizer (“a step behind womanizers, who will sleep with just about anything in a skirt”), Carrie runs into Mr. Big with a model on his arm (“I felt like I was wearing patchouli in a room full of Chanel”), and Samantha sleeps with a confirmed modelizer (“Samantha demanded nothing less than the same consideration given every other model in town”).

Juxtaposing the glitz and glamor of model-life against the flaws-and-all realness of “mortal” life, the show makes a surprisingly compelling case in favor of the latter. I say “surprising” only because the show is so deeply associated in the public consciousness with glitz and glam. 

This, however, is not at all the world we see in Models and Mortals. These are real New Yorkers. They sit on the floor and eat takeout. They buy cereal at the bodega. They eat too many sweet potato canapes after a fashion show. 

The “model” is deployed in this episode as a symbol of acquisition. For the men who date them, they are a trophy to be won (and perhaps to be captured on film). For the models themselves, modeling is framed as a path to a life of excitement and material gain. As supermodel Xandrella coos to the camera in a cutaway “interview” scene, “you can get anything, I’ve been offered trips to Aspen, weekends in Paris, Christmas in St Barts, a Bulgari necklace, a breast job…”

The “mortal,” on the other hand, is portrayed as having both less and more. Lacking in money and flawless good looks, they are possessed of a joy and good humor that comes from being real—from eschewing the fantasies of endless acquisition for the pleasures of the here and now. As it says in Pirkei Avot: “Who is rich? He who rejoices in his lot.”

This “rejoicing in one’s lot”  is highlighted by a memorable scene between Carrie and Derek, aka “the Bone,” who we are told is “the world’s biggest underwear model and Stanford’s most important client.” Lounging next to Carrie as they share a cigarette, he asks her: “what do you want to be when you grow up?” 

Carrie responds: “Well, I think this might be it.”

Watching the show as a teenager and a young adult, I didn’t bat an eye at this response. I assumed that’s how life worked. You got a charming apartment, you had good friends, you figured out how to make a living, and then, well, you enjoyed those things.

At age thirty-three, I can appreciate how revolutionary Carrie’s response really was. Most of the people I know, whether in their twenties or sixties, would never say “this might be it.” Rather, we live as though life is something that will start as soon as… as soon as we have more money, as soon as we have more status, as soon as we get a promotion, as soon as we’re married, as soon as we have kids, as soon as we retire, and so on. 

The “mortals” of Models and Mortals offer us a different way of being in the world—one in which life is not about endlessly grasping for more. Uninterested in living life as a grab for prizes, they are equally uninterested in being a prize for someone else to grab. 

This, it turns out, is more alluring than the “perfection” that a model could bring to the table. As Mr. Big states to Carrie at the end of the episode, “There are so many goddamn gorgeous women out there in this city… [but] after a while you just wanna be with the one that makes you laugh.”

Unlike so many other shows on TV in the 90s and early 2000s, Sex and the City was never about “trying to have it all.” This was a show about having it all—about having everything that really matters. Little did we know as we watched it on dorm room beds and in our first apartments, that we already did. 

Inspired by the sages of old who paired the weekly Torah reading with a selection from the books of the prophets, I will be pairing my SATC commentary with a selection from the later works of the franchise (the two movies and “And Just Like That…”) with the hopes that this act of juxtaposition can help us make meaning: 

Pair SATC S01E02 with the Sex and the City movie’s opening scenes. In voiceover, Carrie states: “Year after year, 20-something women come to New York City in search of the two L’s: labels and love.” With this opening line, she sets up the movie as a story of upward mobility and acquisition. Let Models and Mortals be a tonic and a tikkun for this low point. 

The post Having It All appeared first on Jewcy.

This is undeniably a different show—with a different sensibility—than the series it would over the years grow and evolve to become. Carrie is a brunette. She’s saltier and less precious. She talks directly to the camera.

A self-proclaimed “sexual anthropologist,” she spends the episode investigating ideas about relationships: why are there so many great unmarried women, and no great unmarried men? Or: can women have sex without emotion—like men do? To get the answers, she interviews friends and acquaintances. Here we meet Samantha, Miranda, and Charlotte, along with a roster of toxic bachelors who give us the male perspective as they pump iron at the gym.

As the years passed, however, the show drifted away from this early vision. Carrie stopped talking to the camera, they lightened her hair and ditched the light jazz, and the aesthetic became somehow pinker and shinier. It would seem, then, that the Sex and the City we have (along with its movies and reboot) is only one of many possible shows that could have emerged from this pilot.

So what is it that pushed SATC to choose the path they chose? And was that choice inevitable? The answer—it would seem—is Mr. Big, smiling from the back seat of his limo, offering Carrie a ride home from Manhattan’s hottest new club—Chaos. 

It’s Mr. Big who will pull Carrie out of her role as “sexual anthropologist” and make her the hero—not the observer—of the story. It is their great and tortured romance that will transform her character from smokey sex columnist to wide-eyed romantic. His story arc will end up becoming the arc of the show itself. 

This is made all the more fascinating by the fact that Sex and the City very nearly had no story arc at all. According to the ever-valuable SATC coffee table book, Sex and the City: Kiss and Tell, Darren Star originally conceived of the show as an anthology series—a kind of relationship procedural, with Carrie as the investigator focusing on a different “case” each week.

Having ditched the anthology idea, Sex and the City became something akin to a romcom adapted for the small screen and spread out across six seasons. To characterize it as such, however, requires the clarity of hindsight. Watching SATC in real time back in the 2000s, it was not at all obvious that this was a love story at all, let alone Mr. Big’s love story. It felt entirely plausible that Carrie would end up with someone else, or with no one at all. 

Perhaps, however, such speculation is fruitless. As the sages wrote of the book of Genesis in the Midrash (forgive me, I’m a rabbinical student), it is not appropriate for humans to inquire of what happened before creation. The Torah begins with the moment order emerged from chaos, and we will never know what came before—nor what alternative creations could have possibly emerged instead. 

Similarly, we cannot know what would have happened had Carrie not stumbled out of Chaos that night. We cannot know what would have happened had Big not been there to pick her up. All we have is what’s in front of us. 

That said, seeing Carrie and Big sit together in the back of Big’s limo, I can’t help but be impressed with a sense of rightness. 

Yes. This is how it had to be.

Inspired by the sages of old who paired the weekly Torah reading with a selection from the books of the prophets, I will be pairing my SATC commentary with a selection from the later works of the franchise (the two movies and “And Just Like That…”) with the hopes that this act of juxtaposition can help us make meaning: 

Pair SATC S01E01 with AJLT S01E10 (minute 35:44-37:00), in which Carrie scatters Big’s ashes off of “their bridge” in Paris. It would seem that this would end Big and Carrie’s multi-decade story arc. This arc emerged from Chaos, and to chaos it has returned. What comes next is anyone’s guess.

The post In the Beginning, There Was Carrie and There Was Big appeared first on Jewcy.

Sex and the City has touched on religion before. Charlotte had sex with a Chasidic folk artist and later converted to Judaism under the auspices of Rabbi Minsch. Miranda dated a lapsed Catholic who had to shower immediately after sex. Brady was—albeit reluctantly—baptized, and Samantha tried to fuck her neighborhood priest. 

In all such storylines, however, religion was merely a pretext for further exploration of the show’s main themes: sex and relationships. 

When Carrie cased Mr. Big’s church, for instance, she was decidedly uninterested in anything that might be deemed otherworldly.  “As I watched people leaving church,” she narrated, “I was amazed at how they looked. Valentino, Escada, Oscar de la Renta. What is it about God and fashion that go so well together?”

In this week’s episode of And Just Like That…, however, belief is put front and center—not as a pretext, but as a powerful theme in and of itself. 

First, there is the matter of Carrie’s reading lamp, which flickers on and off, prompting her to wonder if Big is trying to reach out to her from the hereafter. 

“Since when do you believe in the afterlife?” Miranda asks. “I thought we were on the same page about this.”

“Yes, we were,” Carrie answers, “but in light of recent events, I’ve changed my vote to undecided.” 

She knows that it sounds absurd to Miranda, and she plays it off as though she doesn’t believe too much in such things. Nonetheless, as the light above her bed continues to flicker, she struggles to deny a powerful intuition that Big is once again here with her. 

Belief is also a key element in the story of Rock’s They-Mitzvah. 

Despite lavish festivities and a fantastic trans rabbi, Rock refuses to go up to the bima at the very last minute, sending Charlotte and Harry into a panic. 

“I’m not doing it,” Rock says. “I don’t believe in it.”

As a future rabbi, I can’t help but take such a scene a bit too seriously, reflecting on all the ways in which Rock’s reaction is, while upsetting, perfectly understandable. After all, what are we (the Jewish world) really giving kids to believe in? If we think expensive parties, cash gifts, and cool, relatable rabbis are the answer—we are wrong. Thirteen-year-olds have strong convictions, and don’t like empty rituals. Harry’s attempt to bribe Rock into doing the ceremony with an Oculus shows just how deeply we misunderstand what would actually make a B-Mitzvah ceremony appealing to a principled, intelligent, and curious kid like Rock. 

When strong-arming and bribery fail, Charlotte takes the opportunity to read from the Torah herself, having the Bat Mitzvah ceremony she never had. In doing so, she proves that Judaism is more than something that parents foist on children. Jewish identity, after all, cannot simply be passed on to one’s children. It must be modeled. If it means nothing to the parents, it will mean nothing to the kids. When Charlotte shows her family just how much her Judaism means to her, Rock’s attitude softens, and they join their mother on the bima.

Meanwhile, Miranda is giving up a prestigious internship to follow Che to Los Angeles for the shooting of a pilot, prompting a B-Mitzvah bathroom showdown between Carrie and Miranda that completes the Carriefication of Miranda and the Mirandafication of Carrie. 

Their fight is a direct echo of the one they had years ago when Carrie was getting ready to follow Petrovsky to Paris. Now, however, the roles are reversed. 

“Miranda, I’ve known you for a hundred years,” Carrie says.

“And?” Miranda retorts. “Am I not allowed to change a little bit? Or a lot? Or change back again if I feel like it? Do I have to follow my own rigid rules until the day that I die?”

It’s here, in this scene, that the show’s many haters are revealed to be just that—haters. The constant sneering refrain that Miranda (and the other characters) had changed is revealed to be an utterly facile critique, one which confuses the show’s central theme for an accident of bad writing. Yes, Miranda has changed. Yes, she has become insufferable. Yes, we miss the old Miranda and yes, we hate Che. This, however, is how we are supposed to feel. In the show’s final episode, we see how very much the writers were in full control of this plotline. 

And they stick the landing. Like the entire series, the finale is somber, beautiful, profound. This is not to say that it didn’t have flaws. It did, but in a sea of lazy takes about “Woke Moments” and Che Diaz memes, I prefer to be an AJLT believer. 

Other Thoughts: 

• Kudos to the show for doing a powerful and emotionally satisfying Samantha arc through text messages alone. 
• This ending felt complete. I’ve clamored for a second season, but I no longer feel I need one. That said, I still want one. 
• Best rabbi representation ever. 
• Hot take: was the flickering light Stanford? I never bought that he was in Japan. Is he in the Upside Down? 
• I’m terribly afraid that the negative press and terrible reviews will stop them from making a second season. That said, negative press and terrible reviews have never stopped them before. 
• Rock may “not believe” in Judaism now, but in about ten years they’ll definitely be studying Gemara at Svara. 
• How about season two starts with Che getting really into Peloton…

The post Belief and the City appeared first on Jewcy.

There are other such memes out there, comparing the down-to-earth, Chinese food eating, TV binging Miranda of yesteryear with hopeless romantic, reckless, trying-to-have-it-all-and-more Miranda of today. The idea is that this new Miranda is not Miranda at all—that she has, in a sense, been body-snatched. 

Who is this imposter? Some have ventured to say that Miranda has been overtaken by the actress who plays her, Cynthia Nixon. Others think that the writers simply lost the thread, transforming Miranda into a new character. But perhaps this new Miranda is not new at all. 

Consider, for instance, the scene in this week’s episode when Miranda shows up to Che’s apartment unannounced with cookies. She thrums with giddiness and radiates a familiar nervous energy. Are you not reminded of early 2000s Carrie showing up in a beret at Mr. Big’s apartment with a bag of McDonald’s?

Consider also the words she used when she asked Steve for a divorce. “[I want] more… more everything… more connection, more energy, more sex, more me.” Is this not an echo of Carrie’s famous plea to Petrovsky for more? “I’m someone who is looking for love. Real love. Ridiculous, inconvenient, consuming, can’t-live-without-each-other love.”

It seems that Miranda has become the friend she once judged, losing herself in pursuit of the intensity of the show’s unlikely new Mr. Big, Che Diaz. 

Carrie, meanwhile, has become Miranda. Gearing herself up to go on a second date with Peter, the teacher who puked on her, Carrie warns Charlotte not to get too excited. “It is not a date,” she demurs. “It is a do-over between two people who got sick on one another. Let’s take the romance out of it.” She has at last heeded Miranda’s words and stopped “living in a fantasy.” 

How are we to understand the Carriefication of Miranda and the Mirandification of Carrie? We might venture that this is who Miranda has always been — a “pick me girl” who defines herself in opposition to those around her, basing her self-worth on the extent to which she is not “like other girls.” When her best friend was a starry-eyed, boy-crazy romantic, she played the down-to-earth professional, and when Carrie slows to her speed, she responds by amping up.

We might also venture to say that Carrie and Miranda represent a sort of archetypical Yin and Yang, held eternally in balance by the difference of the other. When Carrie is brought down to earth by hard life circumstances, Miranda correspondingly lifts off the ground. 

This last theory, however, ignores the fact that Carrie and Miranda are not a dyad, but rather parts of a quadrangle, more akin to the four elements than the Yin-Yang. It is the four gals—Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha—whose essential prototypical energies hold the universe of Sex and the City together. 

And yet, Samantha isn’t here.

Perhaps that’s why the cosmic order has been disrupted. Perhaps that’s why the show has a chasm so deep that not even Seema, Nya, Nya’s boyfriend, LTW, LTW’s husband and kids, and “Lisette from downstairs” can fill it. 

Perhaps also this why up has become down, Carrie has become Miranda, and Miranda has become Carrie. 

Some other thoughts:

• The structure of this week’s episode, locking all the characters together in a women’s shelter in Brooklyn, worked very well—as close to a “bottle episode” as SATC has ever done. 
• This show has too many new characters. Seema is flawless and fits right in, but please, I don’t need more “Lisette from downstairs,” or LTW. Nya and her partner deserve their own show, but they don’t work on this one. 
• Lily’s tampon plotline got some genuine lols out of me, and I also feel like I learned a lot about tampons. 
• Charlotte once again proved to me why she is TV’s best Jewish mother. Unlike the typical overbearing Jewish mother trope, she is a fierce balabusta—the spiritual core of her Jewish home, ready to accept her non-binary child’s identity but unwilling to let them slouch on their Torah portion prep. 
• Anthony’s unequivocal rejection of his date’s holocaust denial was a real gift on Holocaust Remembrance Day. 
• One critique of the episode’s Jewish content: the Jewish world already came up with a word for a non-binary Bar/Bat Mitzvah and it’s “B-Mitzvah,” not “They Mitzvah.” Come on, now.

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