babies

Season Five

/ Mandy / Leave a comment

One- I’m posting Seasons Four and Five on the same day because I just now got the use of my internet back. Apparently, I was so desperate to run from the tornadoes that I left the modem plugged in and it got fried. Like hell I was logging on to myspace at work.

Now I can use the internet, but B. can’t talk shit to Korean kids while he plays video games. Actually, this worked out quite well. *Evil Villain laugh*

Two- SJP is on the cover of Vogue, so now I can’t open my copy until after May 30.

Season Five is beyond weird. Michael Patrick King says in the commentary for Episode One that the season was “problematic, interesting, dark and eventually light.” He also calls it “the year we sent the men away,” and if you pay attention, the only time Carrie has sex is with Mr. Big in San Francisco.

The season is only eight episodes long, reportedly because of SJP’s pregnancy, which they spend the season concealing with empire waist dresses. Also, by the final season of the episode (ha! strike that, reverse it), Cynthia Nixon (Miranda) is pregnant as well, which is confusing on a number of levels: she spent half of the fourth season pretending to be pregnant, and winds up really pregnant a year later. She’s noticeably a little heavier at the start of this season (and actually looks really really pretty with some weight on her), so I’m wondering if Cynthia Nixon had to gain weight to give Miranda some baby weight, slowly lose it, then gain it all back for real.

Personally, this is “the lost season,” because I was studying abroad while it was originally airing. I would get some news about plot lines, but spent the semester watching reruns and getting drunk off Bailey’s Minis, the sponsor of the program in Britain.

Also, and this is going to be slightly blasphemous: this is the season where I get annoyed with SJP. I can’t pin point it exactly, especially since she’s pregnant for the whole season and probably went through a lot of personal changes, but I just remember having the feeling that SJP had become way too full of herself, and it was seeping in to the show. Maybe it was because the show had officially become a juggernaut, or SJP had become more comfortable with her role as a producer and was wielding more influence on the direction of the show, but this is the point where I started to dislike her. I’ll point out some specific examples momentarily.

Oh please, there are depressed women all over New York doing the exact same thing as her and not calling it art.

/ Mandy / Leave a comment

Episode Twelve: one

MPK and I have differing views on why this episode is called “One,” which is unsettling because he wrote the episode. He says: only one man for you, the baby is one, the first of the Petrovsky episodes. I say: yes, the baby is one, but also Samantha finds one gray hair and Carrie meets Petrovsky at 1 a.m.

I saw an interview with the SATC girls and Oprah where SJP tells how Michail Baryshnikov came to be a part of the show. She said she had the idea while she was washing her hair, then she mimed hair-washing, then she repeated herself while everyone else just kind of stared at her. It wasn’t funny, and I think she was trying to be. Anyway, MPK repeats the hair-washing antecdote in the commentary. Is there some connection between Baryshnikov and shampoo that I’m not aware of?

Also, how can Brady be one year old? He was born two seasons ago.

Charlotte gets the best ever “damn, girl” moment on this show, when she walks out of the building in her Elizabeth Taylor get up. So pretty. I always thought she looked like an older, slightly more substantial Katie Holmes.

MPK says they have come to rely less on the voice over in later seasons. I hadn’t noticed.

I also totally spaced on the story with Miranda, how she expects her bullshit to fall away when she meets the right guy so she can say “I love you,” and then that’s exactly what happens with Steve in the laundry room. I just never made the connection. Whoops.

Aleksandr is supposed to shake up Carrie’s world, to give it a more arty, European sensibility, says MPK, and he really does serve to show how limited her world view has been until now. But I think the best thing he does is out-bigs Big, if that makes sense. The trouble with Big and Carrie is that he was so much older, so much wealthier, and, at times, belonged to a different social class. And you thought she was really reaching to be with him. Now we see Carrie (who we’re supposed to think is perfect now, since it she was the sane one in the Berger relationship) really straining to make things happen with the Russian, and suddenly Big doesn’t look so unattainable.

Steve, I can't have sex anymore! I have a brain!

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Episode Three: catch-38

Why am I not surprised that Samantha has blown Mick Jagger?

This episode is boring. It’s all baby talk.

But what is up with Steve washing Miranda’s hair with a bar of soap instead of shampoo? I remember when the first Bourne movie came out, someone told me the scene where Matt Damon dyes Franka Potente’s hair and then washes it for her was like super sexy. Then I watched it on a plane, and there was nothing to it. So I’m wondering if it was edited for the airline?