![]() Yet until that last-minute stumble it was sharp, iconoclastic television. In fact, it was a bold riff on the romantic comedy: the show wrestled with the limits of that pink-tinted genre for almost its entire run. ![]() ![]() “Sex and the City,” in contrast, was pigeonholed as a sitcom. ![]() Mob shows, cop shows, cowboy shows-those are formulas with gravitas. It was the peer of “The Sopranos,” albeit in a different tone and in a different milieu, deconstructing a different genre. As if that were a good thing.īut “Sex and the City,” too, was once one of HBO’s flagship shows. Whenever a new chick-centric series débuts, there are invidious comparisons: don’t worry, it’s no “Sex and the City,” they say. By the show’s fifteen-year anniversary, this year, we fans had trained ourselves to downgrade the show to a “guilty pleasure,” to mock its puns, to get into self-flagellating conversations about those blinkered and blinged-out movies. Olympus, the reputation of “Sex and the City” has shrunk and faded, like some tragic dry-clean-only dress tossed into a decade-long hot cycle. Even as “The Sopranos” has ascended to TV’s Mt. Martin hardly invented this attitude: he is simply reiterating what has become the reflexive consensus on the show, right down to the hackneyed “Golden Girls” gag. Martin gives “Sex and the City” credit for jump-starting HBO, but the condescension is palpable, and the grudging praise is reserved for only one aspect of the series-the rawness of its subject matter. But they talked more explicitly, certainly about their bodies, but also about their desires and discontents outside the bedroom, than women on TV ever had before.” “Its characters were types as familiar as those in ‘The Golden Girls’: the Slut, the Prude, the Career Woman, the Heroine. “It might as well have been a tourism campaign for a post-Rudolph Giuliani, de-ethnicized Gotham awash in money,” Martin writes of one of my favorite shows. I tore through the book, yet when I reached Martin’s chronicle of the rise of HBO I felt a jolt. It’s a bias that bubbles up early in Brett Martin’s otherwise excellent new book, “Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From ‘The Sopranos’ and ‘The Wire’ to ‘Mad Men’ and ‘Breaking Bad,’ ” a deeply reported and dishy account of just how your prestige-cable sausage is made. ![]() Yet there’s something screwy about the way that the show and its cable-drama blood brothers have come to dominate the conversation, elbowing other forms of greatness out of the frame. Though “The Sopranos” may have sparked the bad-boy revolution of cable TV, Carrie Bradshaw was the first female anti-hero. ![]()
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January 2023
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