The Sex and the City follow-up And Just Like That… wrapped up its 10-episode run earlier this month, after two months of sometimes startling developments. There was the Peloton business. There was the lack of Samantha Jones. There was the uproar over Che Diaz. What there wasn’t was Candace Bushnell, the former New York Observer journalist whose ‘90s column “Sex and the City” birthed the show of the same name. She wasn’t involved in the revival (nor was really involved in the most of the show or the movies). But in a predictably juicy interview with The New Yorker, she strongly intimated that she wasn’t feeling it.
Bushnell, whose life partially loosely Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw, was asked by the reporter whether she felt similar to the characters in the new show, who feel like they “have suddenly awoken into a sense of being out of step with culture.”
Her response was simply, “No.” She added that she was “really startled by a lot of the decisions made in the reboot,” distancing herself from it by saying, “it’s a television product, done with Michael Patrick King and Sarah Jessica Parker, who have both worked with HBO a lot in the past. HBO decided to put this franchise back into their hands for a variety of reasons, and this is what they came up with.”
When asked if she “sees” herself in the characters anymore, she replied, “Not at all.” But her fictional analog and her parted ways a while ago. “Carrie Bradshaw ended up being a quirky woman who married a really rich guy. And that’s not my story, or any of my friends’ stories.”
But Carrie and her were simpatico for a while, particularly how much both were making in media during a happier time. When she worked for Vogue, in the ‘90s, she says she was paid $5,000 a month — nearly $10,000 a month now, adjusted for inflation.
“I mean, this was a time that writers were getting a Vanity Fair contract for six pieces and two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year,” she said. “People valued writing; it wasn’t considered something everyone can do. Now, because of the computer, everyone has to do it, so we think everyone can do it.”
(Via New Yorker)
