We couldn't help but wonder: were the Sex and the City movies really that bad?

One of the bigger tragedies of the Sarah Jessica Parker/Kim Cattrall feud from 2018, beyond the confirmation that one of the show’s central friendships was very much a fiction, was that it gave permission to treat Sex and the City as exactly the kind of show that it wasn’t.

When Cattrall wrote on Instagram, shortly after the suicide of her brother, that Parker’s public condolences were “hypocritical” and an attempt to “exploit” tragedy to restore her “nice girl persona”, it enveloped their relationship in malice, subterfuge and vitriol, as did a Page Six article that Cattrall linked to, in which Parker was alleged to be the key instigator of a “mean girl culture” that saw Cattrall ostracised on set.

As a result, the years of writing off tales of behind-the-scenes conflict as tabloid nonsense pushing false misogynist narratives was now untenable, landing Sex and the City with a sudden and unexpected darkness, one that cast a different light on the show itself.

Likewise it gave detractors further ammunition to deride the show, which was long brushed off as a series about little more than shoes and handbags and penis euphemisms, driven by a money-hungry fakery and starring women who secretly hated each other.

It’s a perspective that does Sex and the City a great disservice, one that undermines its creative daring, its inherent likeability, and how it shaped so much of the television we watch today.

Of course, it would be remiss to say this was all the fault of that Instagram post, written in bold, super-sized font to make sure even those at the back could read it. Sex and the City, which followed up six largely brilliant seasons with two feature films that undid a lot of what made the series so good, tore up its own legacy all on its own. And managed to offend an entire religion in the process.

When Sex and the City began, it immediately felt like the dawn of a new era in television, driven by an outspoken, foul-mouthed frankness that made the feminism of something like Ally McBeal, then the peak of female-driven watercooler TV, appear already regressive.

Sex and the City existed somewhere between reality and fantasy, where love could be both tough, monotonous and tricky as well as straight out of a fairytale, full of chance introductions, sitcom problems and cartoonish wackiness. But buried beneath the artificial dialogue — full of puns, wordplay and delivery straight of a drag show — was often lots that was heartfelt and charming.

For all the claims that Sex and the City was driven by women who were obsessed with men, the importance of female friendship was always the show’s mission statement, with many of its most memorable scenes depicting the quartet eschewing the dating scene to have fun together, free of romantic baggage. Women additionally made up the bulk of the show’s writing staff, who regularly used their own life experiences as inspiration for the show.

The makeup of the writer’s room could explain why things went so awry in 2008. Four years after Sex and the City went off the air, the series was resurrected for the big screen, with Michael Patrick King, who took over showrunner duties from Darren Star midway through the series, single-handedly writing and directing.

Few were actively clamoring for a movie version of the series from a creative standpoint, the show wrapping up all major plotlines in its original finale. But the project was a go regardless, delayed for several years by Cattrall. In a preview of the pay disputes that reportedly scuppered Sex and the City 3, Cattrall reportedly stalled the project after seeking a salary closer in line with Parker’s, along with script control.

According to Reuters, she was eventually won over by an increased salary and a television deal with HBO, the show’s original broadcaster, though no projects ended up coming to fruition.

But despite Cattrall’s request for greater script control, the first Sex and the City movie is a meandering, unlikeable piece of work. In King’s hands, the film gets almost carried away with the “idea” of Sex and the City. With its outrageous outfits, lifestyle porn and characters reduced to stock archetypes devoid of much shading, it resembles a poor imitation of what came before it. Characters, in lieu of organic storylines, merely recreated past conflicts, with Carrie jilted at the altar by her most significant love interest, the suave, emotionally-harmful Manhattan entrepreneur Big (Chris Noth).

To win her back, Big builds a giant walk-in closet for her in their new luxe apartment, a gesture that resembles a deranged capitalist spin on John Cusack standing outside Ione Skye’s bedroom window with a boombox in Say Anything. It’s a heartbreaking moment, nodding to a worldview that feels completely alien to what the show once was.

“I was a little devastated,” Cynthia Nixon told US talk show host Wendy Williams. “It seemed to me that the show was so much about female empowerment and about women making their own choices and women standing up for what they wanted and supporting themselves. So, to me, to have this [scene] be a climax of the film, that your very wealthy husband built you a really nice closet for your clothes, I thought, ‘Wow, that’s not really what you love about the show, is it?’ Cause that’s not what we were making it for.”

Added Cattrall in an interview with The Times: “The trajectory of the films was different than the series. It became about money. I remember wearing a pair of shoes made by a very big design house and somebody, I heard from a very, very good source, was given a million dollars so those shoes could be seen on camera. I felt like I was a retailer, not an actress.”

It’s a problem that extended to the film’s sequel, an infamous critical bomb that saw the gang hightail it to Abu Dhabi, the ultimate in vulgar materialism built on the backs of the poor, where they indulged in casual racism, cultural insensitivity and puns that even Mae West would describe as “too much”.

In scenes that sparked a major backlash upon its release in May 2010, Carrie and her friends wander through the Middle East as if they’re on safari, cracking jokes about magic carpets, watching with bafflement as a woman in a burka eats a french fry (“The veil across the mouth, it freaks me out. It's like they don't want them to have a voice,” Carrie opines, before getting back to shopping for cheap shoes), and later being forced to flee the country when Samantha is arrested for kissing a man she had previously dubbed “Lawrence of my labia”.

The film’s version of defiance ends up being a climactic chase through a street market, in which Samantha throws condoms into the faces of local men, and then is helped to evade capture by a group of Middle Eastern women who reveal that beneath their burkas are the exact same gaudy designer clothing sported by Carrie and her friends.

They help the women dress up in burkas in order to flee in disguise, with Carrie flashing a leg at a taxi driver so they can all get to the airport in time, otherwise they would have suffered the indignity of getting bumped from first class if they missed their flight.

Beyond embracing the right-wing stereotype of Middle Eastern women as oppressed victims in need of pity and Western salvation, the film’s treatment of Abu Dhabi as a whole is unbearably condescending, with Middle Eastern men depicted as either “exotic” dreamboats straight out of a romance novel, or as volatile savages who shouldn’t be trusted. It goes without saying that the optics of all of this, coming from a show that has always existed in a rarefied, almost universally white world, are ghoulish.

“Our four female cultural avatars, like imperialistic Barbies, milk Abu Dhabi for leisure and hedonism without making any discernible, concrete efforts to learn about her people and their daily lives,” wrote Wajahat Ali for Salon in 2010. “[The] exquisitely tone-deaf movie is cinematic Viagra for Western cultural imperialists who still ignorantly and inaccurately paint the entire Middle East (and Iran) as a Shangri La in desperate need of liberation from ignorant, backward natives.”

In response, director Michael Patrick King denied any racist intent when it came to the film’s script. Speaking to Sky News, he said: “To me it’s not a political movie. It’s an escapist comedy, but of course Samantha Jones in the Middle East puts a smile on my face only because she’s inappropriate wherever she goes… I want to take people on a big party vacation and when I looked around the world what was the current happening destination to me was Abu Dhabi and Dubai. It was thrilling because to me it’s exotic, current and still very steeped in tradition.”

Parker later admitted that the film was a disappointment, but that it came with certain benefits. “I can see where we fell short on that movie, and I’m perfectly happy to say that publicly,” she said. “I will say, I also understand how much friggin’ money it made.”

But the damage had been done. By the time critic Mark Kermode was describing the sequel as a “foul, soul-sucking, horrible vacuum of vile emptiness” in a radio review that quickly went viral, it felt, more than ever, that Sex and the City was over. And for all the disingenuous Instagram griping from Kristin Davis over the cancellation of Sex and the City 3, expressing sadness over the lack of a “final chapter to complete the stories of our characters”, it was clear that there was very little left to actually say about Carrie and co.

To many, the double-blow of the films was enough to eclipse much of what the original series did well. Watched again, ignoring the gloomy spectre of the movies, Sex and the City is radical. While the show’s first and second seasons are often annoyingly anthropological, full of straight-to-camera vox pops and lazy attempts at social commentary, the show deepened as it went on, being insightful and smart as often as it was wildly funny.

And for all the talk of Parker’s “nice girl image”, she deserves credit for never being afraid of making Carrie completely unlikeable, particularly in a story arc in which she engaged in a lengthy affair with Big while dating John Corbett’s almost supernaturally kind-hearted everyman Aidan. It is arguably the show’s dramatic peak, a bruising storyline of stupid decisions, hurt feelings and self-loathing.

In 2013, New Yorker critic Emily Nussbaum wrote about the iffy reputation Sex and the City has long been saddled with, and how hierarchical thinking has contributed to the idea that entertainment that is “stylised, pleasurable and feminine” is inherently inferior. As a result, the show has received little of the kudos and respect that has been permanently magnetised to The Sopranos, Sex and the City’s HBO stablemate, and its equal when it came to turning the network into a major force in television.

“Mob shows, cop shows, cowboy shows—those are formulas with gravitas,” Nussbaum wrote. “Sex and the City, in contrast, was pigeonholed as a sitcom. In fact, it was a bold riff on the romantic comedy… High-feminine instead of fetishistically masculine, glittery rather than gritty, and daring in its conception of character.”

It’s easy to forget quite how brilliant Sex and the City was, and important to remember its influence. From TV series like Girls, Ugly Betty, The Mindy Project and Insecure, to the ways in which dating, eating and dressing have evolved to emulate the lifestyles and fashion spearheaded by the series.

If anything, the best reminder of Sex and the City’s greatness exists today in the form of a meme, one that uses Carrie’s elaborate, inquisitive narration — almost always featuring the words “I couldn’t help but wonder…” — to riff on current events and modern pop culture.

They’re inherently silly and fantastical, with the overwritten rhythm of the opening to a fairytale, but deceptively smart, always grounded in something thoughtful. Despite the movies and Kim Cattrall’s Instagram somewhat denting the show’s legacy, the meme remains the closest thing in spirit to what Sex and the City once was – and how much we ought to cherish it.