Sex and the City revival and The Sopranos prequel movie forgot why their shows made an impact

Slate

"And Just Like That marks HBO’s second attempt this year at resurrecting a founding stalwart of its vaunted, turn of the century golden age, only to accidentally usher in a zombie apocalypse," says Phillip Maciak. "Earlier this fall, the network’s parent company, Warner Bros., released The Many Saints of Newark, David Chase’s feature film return to the New Jersey of The Sopranos. But the film, like this new SATC reboot, was missing something crucial. As a concept, Many Saints seemed brilliant, with Chase using the leverage of The Sopranos to make a long-held passion project about the Newark riots of his youth. But by the time the first trailer dropped, it was clear that the film had been inexorably pulled back into the orbit of Tony Soprano, with James Gandofini’s son playing a teenage version of his iconic character. Populated by Muppet Babies versions of all of our favorite DiMeo crime family associates, Many Saints felt both too far away from the original series’ magic and too close to it." Maciak adds: "Many Saints and And Just Like That both seem more interested in resuscitating long-gone characters than revitalizing the TV series that made us care about them in the first place. Rather than return to the formula that made those series great, Chase and (Michael Patrick) King chose to tinker around in the HBO Golden Age Extended Universe. It’s understandable that these writers would want to explore new possibilities while relying on their beloved cast of characters as a safety net, but, especially for shows that did so much to reinvent the form of TV in the 21st century, it’s somewhat baffling how little the new series seem to care about how those stories were told...For all the focus on Sex and the City’s groundbreaking characters, the structure of Sex and the City was never merely incidental to its impact. In an essay on Sex and the City and The Sopranos in 2013, Emily Nussbaum argued that, while SATC was often condescended to as a shallow sitcom, its true form was a kind of philosophical romantic comedy, using the horizonless expanse of serial TV to stage symbolic debates about sexuality, femininity, and love. The brunch table wasn’t just a pit-stop between A and B plots, and the voiceover wasn’t just throwaway exposition; they were where the messy, critical work of the show got done. Sex and the City famously leaned harder into will-they-won’t-they plotting and operatic melodrama as the series went on, but it always retained that critical, conversational core. And Just Like That is the show’s culminating pivot from comedy to tragedy. Many Saints of Newark suffered from almost the reverse problem. The Sopranos was a television show, and it was great because and not in spite of that. Producing a feature-length period coming-of-age film tethered so closely to the fates of the series’ original characters neglects the fact that The Sopranos made the impact it did because of its patient week-by-week reinvention of multiple TV genres, from the soap opera to the mob show to the Western. One of the things that was revolutionary about the Sopranos was the way that it made spectators live with these bad men, to see past the spectacle of their violent acts to the boredom and conservatism and ordinariness of their lives."

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