And Just Like That Is Fixing Sex & The City’s Biggest Controversy
Sex and the City faced significant controversy in its original series for its overwhelming lack of diversity, an issue the reboot series tries to fix.
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Sex and the City’s original series was repeatedly under controversy for its lack of diversity, a problem And Just Like That is directly fixing. HBO’s Sex and the City aired from 1998 to 2004, with two sequel movies in 2008 and 2010. Like many popular shows of the 1990s and 2000s, Sex and the City was continually criticized for its overwhelming whiteness and lack of diversity, especially since it took place in New York City – one of the most diverse locations in the world. While bringing the original characters back for a new chapter of their lives in the modern landscape, HBO Max’s And Just Like That makes it a point to include voices and underrepresented communities at the forefront of the series.
Considering all four main characters, recurring side characters and major boyfriends were white in Sex and the City, the only significant diversity came from Charlotte’s Chinese-American daughter, Lily, and Carrie and Charlotte’s “gay best friends” Stanford and Anthony. While Willie Garson iconically portrayed Stanford, the late actor stated (via Page Six) that he felt he couldn’t publicly reveal himself to be heterosexual. He explained that because he was better known for playing gay characters, he felt the LGBT community would find it offensive if he needed to make it clear that Garson himself was straight, elaborating that doing so would imply that it was a “bad thing” to be perceived as gay. As such, even the nuanced gay characters in Sex and the City weren’t necessarily giving voices to gay actors.
While Samantha’s absence from And Just Like That posed a major issue for the series, it also opened up an incredible opportunity to bring in new, underrepresented voices and communities. And Just Like That’s new main characters Che Diaz (Sara Ramirez), Lisa Todd Wexley (Nicole Ari Parker), Dr. Nya Wallace (Karen Pittman), and Seema Patel (Sarita Choudary) are all working to fill in the gap left by Samantha, while representing communities that were left out of Sex and the City. By including leading characters and actors that are racially and ethnically diverse, from the LGBT+ community, and don’t all fit into the exclusively wealthy backgrounds of Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte, And Just Like That is working to amend the well-represented portrait of New York City that it failed to capture in the original show.
And Just Like That is also using its new characters to directly address the societal shortcomings of some of Sex and the City’s main characters, with Miranda actively (and uncomfortably) attempting to prove her “wokeism” to her Black law professor Dr. Nya Wallace. Instead of pretending like Sex and the City’s characters have always been sensitive to political correctness and uplifting voices of underrepresented communities, And Just Like That is showing their personal growth in becoming better allies, such as how Miranda learns from mistakes of white savior moments with Nya. And Just Like That isn’t simply including diverse characters to prove that it’s modern and “woke;” the HBO Max series is genuinely giving platforms to these voices and making them integral aspects of the series in their own right.
As compared to many modern reboots trying to change their previous shortcomings in the modern landscape, And Just Like That’s diversity is interwoven in the series in a genuine fashion – it’s not diversity for diversity’s sake. Although the Sex and the City reboot’s first two episodes lean into the awkward and more uncomfortable aspects of adjusting to the current climate and “wokeism,” the personal lives of And Just Like That’s new characters will soon show that the diversity in the series is much more than “teaching moments” for the white characters. As the series moves away from the heavy-handed tackling of diversity in its first two episodes, And Just Like That will be trying to organically bring underrepresented stories to its forefront.
Link Source : https://screenrant.com/just-like-that-sex-city-controversy-fixed/