Can Gen Z Even Handle ‘Sex and the City’?

Ready or not, here they come. Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha are strapping on their Manolo Blahniks and strutting over to Netflix. As of April 1, all six seasons of Sex and the City are available on the streaming platform for the first time ever, which means that Netflix’s approximately 260 million subscribers now have the chance to revisit—or even meet—the famous foursome played by Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon, Kristin Davis, and Kim Cattrall. And oh honey, we’re not entirely sure the masses are ready.

Sex and the City has, of course, not been kept under lock and key since the series aired its finale in 2004. All six seasons have been easily accessible via DVD box sets (remember those?), PG-13 reruns airing in syndication on E!, and of course, the entire series and both movies (yes, even SATC 2) streaming on Max. Still, Sex and the City on Netflix has the potential to redefine the series. Look, for instance, at Suits—a far less critically acclaimed and popular series—which made a huge splash when it landed on Netflix last year, even though the series had been available on Peacock for years. The success of Suits—which broke streaming records—was so huge that a new spin-off series, Suits: LA, is currently in the works at NBC. (Sex and the City is steps ahead of Suits in that department. There already is a revival series, the delightfully batty and polarizing And Just Like That, starring three of the four ladies (we miss you, Samantha!), which was recently renewed for a third season on Max.

Will Sex and the City, a show that’s never really fallen out of the zeitgeist, see a similar resurgence? It’s tough to say, though the show’s new streaming home will likely open the SATC women up to an audience that has, somehow, not yet been exposed to them. According to a quarterly earnings report, approximately 95.8 million people subscribed to Discovery+ and Max as of last August—a large number, but just a little more than a third of Netflix’s reach.

It’s safe to say that many of these new viewers will be young. The driving force behind the streaming domination of Suits last summer were Zoomers who weren’t old enough to appreciate or enjoy the show when it originally aired from 2011 to 2019. This same demographic—young adults now attending college classes and making TikToks—would have been even younger during Sex and the City’s heyday. (An uncomfortable reminder: Someone born in 2003, when Sex and the City’s penultimate season aired, can legally order a cosmo this year.)

Will they embrace Sex and the City with the same fervor? I’m not convinced. No offense to Suits, but as a standard legal network procedural, it’s simply an easier show to digest than Sex and the City—a frank, unapologetic, groundbreaking series that aired on HBO, and not on the USA Network, for a reason.

How will Netflix viewers who lost their minds when Trevor from Love Is Blind secretly had a girlfriend react to the Carrie-Big-Natasha triangle? Will people enjoying The Gentlemen turn off their Netflix autoplay when Samantha Jones starts talking about the guy she slept with who had “the funkiest tasting spunk”? Gen Z allegedly has a more prudish relationship with sex than their elders—a generalization, for sure, but one that data suggests has at least some truth to it—and it’s not hard to believe that the show’s frank and nuanced approach to dating and relationships might be lost on the youth.

Unless a fresh, younger perspective is just what the doctor ordered. Look, for instance, at the enduring power of Girls, the spiritual daughter of SATC that’s long been available to stream in full on Max. Lena Dunham’s seminal series has sparked something of a cottage industry, inspiring popular podcasts like the HBO Girls Rewatch Podcast to revisit each episode and unpack it through a Zoomer lens. Girls has such staying power that it’s inspired some Zoomers to wax nostalgic for a 2010s Brooklyn that they never experienced. (It wasn’t all that great, I promise.)

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