Sitcoms put together characters that quite specifically do not belong together. The longer the show goes on, the more absurd it becomes. The "tight-knit" group was always a plot device. Each episode required conflict, and yet the group needed to stay together. That was the show. That is always the show. Why didn't Wally Cleaver tell Eddie Haskell to get lost? Why didn't Seinfeld lock Kramer out? It might as well be "No Exit":
Three damned souls, Joseph Garcin, Inèz Serrano, and Estelle Rigault, are brought to the same room in Hell and locked inside by a mysterious valet. They had all expected torture devices to punish them for eternity, but instead, find a plain room.... Garcin says that he was executed for being an outspoken pacifist, while Estelle insists that a mistake has been made; Inèz... realizes that they have been placed together to make each other miserable.... [SPOILER ALERT] This causes Garcin to abruptly attempt an escape. After he repeatedly tries to open the door, it suddenly and inexplicably opens, but he is unable to bring himself to leave. The others remain as well. He says that he will not be saved until he can convince Inèz that he is not cowardly. She refuses to be persuaded, observing that he is obviously a coward and promising to make him miserable forever. Garcin concludes that... "hell is other people."
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My wife, 55YO staunch Democrat, who loved the original series, never watched this one because, in her own words, "It was too woke".
…damned souls… are brought to the same room in Hell and locked inside by a mysterious valet… Garcin concludes that... "hell is other people."
Reminds me of Althouse and this comment community.
I'll bet that during any revival of "No Exit," members of the audience are thinking about exiting, looking at their watch, and keeping their ear tuned for the line "Hell is other people," so they can get the "hell" out.
…sounds derivative…anyways, not to poop on anyone’s fun but sounds like they went out like an aged out sports star what wrecks his afterlife by staying in the game far too late. I like SJP, especially the one where she lives in Tuxedo Park or wherever it was…
It's an old joke that you're stuck with your family. Of course in the modern world there are choices, perhaps culminating in the lonely apartment in the city.
The first big academic feminist theory was that novels were oppressive because they framed women's lives as beginning and ending with the mating ritual of marriage, ie. Jane Austen.
That the men's stories effectively ended in the same way in novels like that didn't seem to occur to anyone.
Or, one's nose fell off from syphillis.
And for something like 40 years, that was the story of Sex and the City: aging women asking themselves "should I submit to marriage and lose my future, or keep my girlhood dreams and keep courting (and hope my nose doesn't fall off from syphyllis)?"
The answer is in. They cancelled the answer.
…having lived with those women in NYC a bit before the four were a thing…most of the girls what were there are now single, so I hear. A couple are real life crazy cat ladies like the story goes. None sound content. Maybe it’s just sour from the messenger, maybe just the way it goes…
MadTV showed all the respect this enterprise deserved with their bending the show’s characters over tables in funny parodies several years ago. Worth a watch on YouTube…
If I recall correctly Seinfeld ended with all four of them locked in a jail cell together.
…tables, hot dog carts, bank counters, lol…
https://youtu.be/X4qh7loNISY
Makes me think how so many in the press gaggle would love to be locked in a room with Trump as long as there was a camera and their "exclusive" could be released to the world.
Political Junkie, my 55 yo spouse identifies as a freethinking moderate, but has never in her life voted for a Republican. She hate-watches the new series and was relieved to hear it was cancelled because that’s the only way she’d stop watching it.
Where’s the gabagool!?”
https://youtu.be/9RFdg4CHBgg
I never watched a minute of the original show when it was in its heyday. Well...maybe a minute. That's all it took.
And if I recall, it was surrounded on HBO by other shows I did watch. It might have been shows like Oz, or The Larry Sanders Show, or even The Sopranos that came on before, or after, Sex and the City, but either way, the show was pap compared to those surrounding it.
I was untouched by the entire thing. But seeing how Cynthia Nixon turned out in real life, I suspect that the show appealed to that sort of woman mostly. Though I did know more than a few guys who loved the show and I could never figure out if they loved it because they were feminine guys or because they were trying to get close with a woman who wanted to watch it.
Still...so many of these shows come and go and if you don't watch them at all you're happily untouched by the crap they issue out weekly. Or appropriately as a finale.
"…sounds derivative…anyways, not to poop on anyone’s fun..."
Are you saying "poop" because you watched the finale? I'm told there's a plot point about a clogged toilet and shots — closeups?? — of the overloaded toilet.
How did the show end up there — in the toilet?
Hate-watching. I love it. I hate-listen to NPR on the car radio.
"But seeing how Cynthia Nixon turned out in real life, I suspect that the show appealed to that sort of woman mostly...."
14 years before "Sex and the City" began, we got introduced to Cynthia Nixon in "Amadeus." I watched that recently by chance, and it never occurred to me that she was the maid Salieri sent to keep watch of Mozart.
"Sitcoms put together characters that quite specifically do not belong together."
Two and a Half Men has a scene where the dysfunctional brothers are watching The Odd Couple on TV, and talking about what a ridiculous premise it is.
Wow - Cynthia was one of the maids from Amadeaus. Did not realize that. Thank you hostess.
Cynthia has fallen.
This damned soul walks into a bar in Hell. The bartender says, "Why the long face?"
The American remake of "No Exit," called "The Good Place," was far superior to the original. Of course, it also had Kristen Bell.
Thanks a lot Wince. I find you to be good company.
On an actually serious note, Evan Handler, who plays Charlotte's husband, survived leukemia (AML) as a young man, was not expected to survive, and beat his way back to life by educating himself, then not letting anyone else make any decision for him, through utterly brutal treatments and relapses. He fought like hell, and in his book, Time on Fire, he relays it with humor. His point is that you have to educate yourself thoroughly, then watch every treatment, and constantly question everyone. When you come eyeball to eyeball with death itself, read this book. And try to forget that Sex in the City got you to it.
Now I see he has a new book about life after cancer: It's Only Temporary: the Good News and the Bad News About Being Alive. A fitting ending for the best character in the show, and perhaps a repudiation of the entire production.
Cynthia Nixon had a bit part in "Little Darlings", 1980. Her character's name was Sunshine. Time proved otherwise.
Never watched it, but I think my version of 'No Exit' would be me, watching the 3 in their room, on television, unable to turn it off.
I watched the show a few times and determined that I could not stand the four main characters.
tim maguire said...
Political Junkie, my 55 yo spouse identifies as a freethinking moderate, but has never in her life voted for a Republican. She hate-watches the new series and was relieved to hear it was cancelled because that’s the only way she’d stop watching it.
Ha, when I first read this I thought you were referring to Leave It to Beaver.
I'd say Hell isn't other people. Hell will be getting locked in a room and forced to watch Sex and City and this thing, over and over again.
There's a character on Gilded Age who is a spinster living off her rich sister. Through a twist of fate, she becomes rich and the sister poor. She immediately becomes an insufferable busybody telling everyone around her what to do, lording it over the sister who for so long supported her.
I think it's fitting that this woman is played by Cynthia Nixon.
I watched one or two episodes when it first came on. Iirc there was some nudity which is always a plus, but I didn't particularly like the characters or the plots. I gave up on it. If you want to see a show that satirizes women's excessive love of expensive shoes and designer clothing, there has never been anything better than Absolutely Fabulous. Emily in Paris is sort of okay. There's no nudity, but Lily Collins is fun to look at as is the scenic background of Paris. If you're going to make a show about expensive clothes, it's smart to use Paris as backdrop and have a woman who looks like Lily Collins in the foreground.
Apropos of something, I've been reading a book about the Black Plague. The advice of physicians at that time was to get out of town. Lacking that, they recommended bleeding the patients. As a prophylactic measure, they recommended going to the latrine and breathing in the noxious fumes. There was a theory that the bad drove the bad away. The miasma of the latrine killed the miasma of the plague......Perhaps watching this show with the scenic background of an overflowing toilet would have a similar effect.
So why didn't Estelle and Ines just conclude that hell was men and kick Garcin out? Cynthia Nixon would have. So would most of the NY style writers we encounter here.
Sartre and de Beauvoir became relevant again when we realized that she was Ghislaine to his Jeffrey. Hell was indeed a short, near-sighted, chain-smoking, Marxist-Leninist Frenchman and his moll/pimp.
Cynthia Nixon playing Michael Murphy's daughter in a political satire written by Garry Trudeau sounds like another version of hell. I didn't watch that show. It seemed weird to me that she'd be playing Murphy's daughter, since I'd come to think of her as a perpetual old maid. She's actually younger than I am and was in her early 20s in 1988.
Cynthia struck me as an American version of Sophie Ward, "Young Winston" actor Simon Ward's beautiful ex-actress daughter, who like Cynthia, ended up married to a squat, fat woman who is about as attractive as Jean-Paul Sartre.
P.S. If you need me, I'll be trying to stick my nose back on.
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