Let me say this right at the beginning, I am all for the current culture of social awareness. In the past, we have glossed over serious injustices and therefore the hyper-vigilantism that people, especially young people, demonstrate these days is appropriate, and even necessary. So, I am, what the kids call, an ally. Now that we have got that out of the way, on to some very basic things. By which I mean, I have spent the past couple of weeks binge-watching two shows.
The first, And Just Like That…, is the sequel to the iconic noughties-favourite show, Sex and the City, the story of four women in New York navigating through their sexual, fraternal, professional and emotional lives, while always wearing five-inch heels. The characters, even though unattainably fashionable and easily successful, also managed to be relatable. In fact, in the early years of user-generated content on the Internet, ‘Which Sex and the City character are you?’ quizzes were the cornerstone on the basis of which we tried to project our online personality. (Or not, depending on how grounded you were. My answers never gave me Carrie, even though we both have curly hair and so I had no choice but to call the quiz fake.)
All four of the characters were flawed, and all of them evoked in the viewer adoration and frustration, depending on the situation. They were, often, like your real-life friends, lovable despite some annoying traits. But, now in their new avatar, the girls from Sex and the City look like they have gone through a serious, mandatory re-education programme, so that every nuance of ‘wokeness’ can be satisfactorily hit. Despite my proclamations at the beginning of this piece, oh my god, am I exhausted by this.
Diversity and representation. Check
And Just Like That… introduced several new characters, to make sure there are absolutely no complaints about representation. Black women, brown women, Asian children, non-binary genders. Check, check, check, check. Representation in popular culture is great, until it becomes an exercise in just ticking off boxes. In fact, once the earnest effort of introducing these new characters was done, the writers seem to have simply forgotten about them. Some of them appear in a couple of episodes with no discernible purpose or plot, and then they just disappear.
Also, the most prominent new character they introduced — a gender binary stand-up comic called Che Diaz — has gone on to become the most hated one on the Internet, a place where unanimous opinions are rarer than Yeti sightings. If that wasn’t enough, the show does not spare any effort to educate us all about how to live in the modern world. Of course, there is an old, white man who refers to a gender non-binary person as she and not they, and so we are all subjected to a little lecture on how that’s not cool. I mean, I can appreciate the beauty of a rainbow, but like an overeager HR department in Pride Month, you don’t have to decorate every little corner with it. There’s a thick line between representation and tokenism and it is actually quite easy to stay on the right side of it.
‘Made in Heaven’: flawed execution
Closer home, things are even more eye-wateringly painful. The second show I had been devoting my sparse free time to was Made in Heaven. It is, of course, as you know, unless you have been living under a rock, a slickly produced series based around the life and clients of a wedding planning outfit. Everyone is rich, most people are stunning-looking, the clothes are wonderful, the sets are flawless, the show is a visual delight.
But then, here too, the writers have employed the lazy tactic of ticking on every single item that can ever appear on a social justice bingo card. So, there’s drama around caste, homosexuality, the Indian preference for fair-skinned brides, domestic violence. The ideas are good, but the execution is seriously flawed. The episodes draw these issues out fully, examining it up close, with absolutely no room for any shades of grey. The viewer is told clearly who the good person is and who the villains are. And then, like a harassed social science teacher in an unruly classroom, at the end of the show, in the most annoying voiceover, the issue is summarised.
For me, what was particularly grating was the fact that all these attempts at refocusing the moral compass of modern society was still mostly staged around its oldest institution: marriage. Or, at the very least, committed monogamy. You can be anything you want to be, these shows seem to suggest, as long as it involves committing to one person. We like you in whatever form you want to present yourself, but we like you better when you are one of a pair. Nothing is subtle. Nothing is nuanced. Everything is a grating exercise in education. At least for the demographic that watches these shows, it is fair to conclude we know about this stuff.
Tell us a story. Don’t make us come to your tutorial.
The writer is the author of ‘Independence Day: A People’s History’.