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When Howard Hawkes's now-classic comedy, His Girl Friday, was released in 1940 starring Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant, the film critic of The New York Times, Frank Nugent, savaged the lead character Hildy Johnson — a divorcee newshound chasing one last scoop before she heads off to re-marry — as "a wild caricature which should not be taken seriously".
He was wrong, of course. Two years earlier, Katherine Hepburn had gone up against Grant at warp-speed in the immortal Bringing Up Baby, and the idea of the fast-talking, ambitious, well-dressed, somewhat mad-cap woman had been a commercial success ever since Claudette Colbert hitched her skirt to hitch a ride with Clark Gable in It Happened One Night.
These movies created a female character lead who became an American cultural classic. Every film and TV show that came afterwards featuring a headstrong, smart-mouthed woman owed a debt to what became known as the "screwball comedies" of the '30s and '40s.
Their lineage is undeniable. You wouldn't have The Mary Tyler Moore Show, or Golden Girls, or 30 Rock, or Parks and Recreation without these films and this type of female character.
Lena Dunham's Girls is the genre's granddaughter, but the HBO smash, Sex and the City, was the golden child of the "screwball comedy": it took all those romantic misunderstandings, outlandish scenarios, and the traditional "battle of the sexes" and wrapped them in enviable designer clothes and unapologetic sexual appetite.
Like the classic films that defined the genre, SATC, delivered strongly written female characters, handed them sharp dialogue and clever repartee and dropped them in situations just a few degrees south of what any romantically exhausted bachelorette might encounter in 1998: weird men with oral sex fetishes; married men who were compulsive liars and a dating roster of the odd, angry and addicted. Just another Friday night in Manhattan.
This is a long run-up to where I know you suspect I'm going with all this but bear with me, because the horror of the present really only makes the most sense when you place it in its correct historical context.
SATC was a success because the madcap was served with a withering millennial scepticism about love and sex, and the show made one key change from the screwball original: it switched out the male romantic lead for several female ones.
The four women of SATC were each other's "love of their lives" as the toxic Mr Big finally figured out. And it made the romantic follies of single NY women bearable that, in the end, they always had each other.
OK — we can't avoid it anymore: here we are, in 2025, and deep into the mystery confounding viewers worldwide: what the hell happened to these women? What the hell happened to the TV show that millions loved?
We are now in series three of And Just Like That, the reboot of SATC, and this strange show has become without question the most awful, cringeful, embarrassing television most of us have probably ever persisted with. Don't take my word for it. And yet, we can't stop watching it.
This bunch of smart, successful young women apparently grew up and lost everything — their sense, intelligence, social radars, insight, ability to read a room, their furniture and — in one case — apparently all their money.
I must admit, I probably always hate-watched SATC — Carrie really was the most awful person — but my dread-watch of its bizarre reboot, And Just Like That, sits now at abysmal levels.
Most of the great screwball comedies were, unsurprisingly, written by straight, white men (notably, except for Bringing Up Baby) and yet those blokes seem to have had a truer grasp of what drives a woman in love, or drives her mad, than do the ultra-hip writers' room of this show.
This quintet of hand-waving hysterics seem to have forgotten how to negotiate an introduction, deal with an attractive co-worker, manage a pernickety neighbour and have even forgotten their own personal histories.
Why is Miranda, a woman who was for years a senior partner in a New York law firm, homeless and living in Airbnbs? Why does Seema, another former partner but of a real estate firm, have no savings at all? Why did Lisa apparently forget that her father was already dead in season one?
These previously gimlet-eyed women are presented as stammering, stuttering idiots, fumbling basic social cues, agreeing to a five year hiatus in their relationship and contradicting their own character arcs. In one episode Carrie is bewildered and unable to ask her boyfriend even the basic meaning of his text messages; in another she becomes a stone-cold bitch to her closest friend Miranda, when she bells the obvious cat of Carrie's flirtation with her neighbour.
I'm sorry for the repetition but: who are these women?
In this strange show, in which nothing ever happens (Seinfeld should sue for IP infringement), the women of SATC have devolved into the kind of unflattering caricatures of befuddled older women that would never have flown in the Golden Girls days.
Everyone is asking but no one seems to know why. And Just Like That features several writers who also worked on the original Sex and the City, including Julie Rottenberg and Elisa Zuritsky and showrunner Michael Patrick King continues to play a significant role in the writing and creative direction of And Just Like That, and of course Sex-meister Darren Star, the original showrunner, is at the helm.
You have to assume that the original writers and the newbies cherish these characters as much as their legions of fans do — and yet they twist them into strange and ludicrous shapes that are at the least insulting and, for me, verge on the misogynistic. I can't name a single female character from all my decades of consuming film and television as absurd as these women.
My discomfort grows as I watch erstwhile capable women presented as bumbling fools, without the reassurance of well-written comedy or clever satire. Instead, the writing is woefully banal, and the women simply presented as unexplained absurdities.
It feels as if it's all a bit of a send-up, as if depicting women in their 50s navigating their version of love, dating, marriage and romantic failure and success simply isn't worthwhile unless you turn them into idiots. Even the (male) titans of Hollywood's so-called "Women's Pictures" knew that'd be a folly: their audiences were smart; their female characters had to be smarter.
Instead, in keeping with the general devolution of civilisation, in one of the most popular television shows in the world right now, the depiction of women has gone backwards.
Kate Hepburn would smack them all over the back of the head.
This weekend, the life of a working woman from a very different perspective: why is it so hard to get a job that provides enough to just live a life and enjoy it?
Have a safe and happy weekend and don't forget to listen to the Hottest 100 of Australian music this weekend from 10am on triple j. It's going to be the biggest party in town.
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