Circling Back
Welcome back to #EmerilHive, a weeklyish newlsetter by Becca Thimmesch. Spoilers ahead!!!
To quote the new Gossip Girl, “hello followers.”
I write to you on this chilly January 54th to once again discuss television. Why not!
At some point last year I made a series of predictions and hopeful musings about the wokeified (and subsequently, yassified) reboots of Sex and the City and Gossip Girl, two shows which teach us that the best things in life are a little bad.
Since then, we’ve had an entire season of this new-fangled GG and just eight delicious episodes of And Just Like That … and I feel it’s time enough to revisit just where exactly my predictions have landed.
We’ll begin with Gossip Girl, a show about teens who still appear to wake up at dawn. In the very first episode, new Blair (ish) makes things very easy on me by saying the quiet part aloud:
"Sant Ambroeus or Yura for coffee, Starbucks for group orders; The Met Steps or the Great Lawn to hang, not the south side; JG Melon's for burgers; Momoya if you're west; Mezzaluna, not Serafina; Sweetgreen but for pickup only; and Dumbo Hall not House."
Sweetgreen … but for pickup only!
Aside from being a pointed reference to the depravity of rich people (who doesn’t love a SG patio moment!?), it’s an easy tick in my predictions column.
Woke Gossip Girl has less giant breakfasts and so far no visible household staff, but still follows the basic premise. Everyone is thin and no one eats very much, teens mainline coffee (flat whites instead of lattes) and martinis, although now one teen (teen!) is sober. Eleanor Waldorf-Rose and yes, actual Wallace Shawn reprise their roles to let you know that some of the characters are Jewish this time around, but Native New York gentiles have never heard of a Kugel.
Two perfect moments made up for the entire series. In the first, a raucous, bisexual new Chuck Bass is found doing a pre-school second proof on a batch of croissants he made from scratch, one of the most shocking and unbelievable suspensions of disbelief I’ve ever been asked to make. In the second, new Blair invites her ex-boyfriend to a surreptitious breakfast date (again, before the first bell) at a fast-casual joint, looks him dead in the eyes and says “no one will recognize us here, it’s Le Pain Quotidien.”
Reader, when I tell you I GUFFAWED.
Who were the Rich Teen consultants on this show? Are Sweetgreen and LPQ really so gauche for dine-in? Is this how someone thinks when they have never and will never have a job?
Where I faltered in my predictions, however, seems somewhat obvious in retrospect. There was never, ever going to be anyone above a size 4 on Gossip Girl. That should have been clear from the start. These teens might say words like “burger” and they might even wear flats, but they’ll be rail thin so long as the sun rises in the East and sets in the West.
OK, that’s Gossip Girl done. Now to the meat of it.
Sex and the City was a perfect show because it was never once self-aware and that’s how life should be. The reboot is self-aware in a “we all went on Zoloft around the premiere of the second movie” sort of way and that’s fine too.
We open on the restaurant in the ground floor of the Whitney, as 3, née 4, wait for their table. I’ve personally never eaten at this establishment because I assumed it was prohibitively expensive, and I’ve always already just spent twenty bucks on a museum ticket even though museums should be categorically free. It doesn’t matter though because, in this universe, it’s some other made up restaurant entirely. The girls immediately delve into ridiculous diet culture commentary about french fries, as if no time at all has passed. OK, whatever.
What got me was Carrie returning home to a silver Mr. Big, cooking salmon. John James Preston, who subsisted off of red meat and red sauce for the entire series, is cooking a filet of salmon with asparagus and lemon, I assume at the behest of his no-doubt exhausted cardiologist. And he still dies! Lesson learned, live a little.
The showrunners try once more to imply that baked salmon holds emotional significance for 1999’s most toxic couple before dropping it entirely.
It is here, if I may, that I’d like to take a moment to reflect on the way both shows have chosen to address COVID. It happened, it was horrible, and now it’s categorically over. Remember when we used to wear masks? Ha ha. You see people wearing them in street shots, of course, but just don’t worry your pretty little head about it.
Miranda Hobbes, a woman whose downfall has been much discussed, is an alcoholic now. Everyone wants to talk about how tragic and unfair it is that a once confident, successful woman should now be written as a flailing drunk who struggles with pronoun use and picking not-lame romantic partners. But that’s life. Can we talk about how her drinks of choice are mini bar bottles of Titos, presumably straight, supplemented with glasses of Chablis. CHABLIS??
The first time Miranda sauntered up to a bar and asked for a glass of Chablis, I was like OK. But the second?
I have to imagine a writer googling “slightly less embarrassing Chardonnay” during a particularly late session.
I had predicted that Miranda, who once took pride in not being able to cook at all, might find herself a Hello Fresh or adjacent box mom. Instead, she’s chained to some sort of bizarre ice cream sundae bar ritual which involves no less than two dozen ramekins per night. What’s her dishwashing schedule? Is she continuously decanting? Who could say.
Given a limitless supply of both monkeys and typewriters, I could have never predicted that a Sex and the City reboot would choose to comment on ghost kitchens. I could have predicted a sourdough reference, however, and I certainly could have predicted a horny sourdough company if you had said the words to me, “Anthony Marantino.”
I did however find it incredibly lazily presented. Not a banneton in sight!
OK, so Anthony is running a sourdough-based ghost kitchen, but minus the fundamental premise of a ghost kitchen because his baked goods aren’t sold on the delivery apps, they’re brought to your door by hot men!!
Thus demonstrating that not everything needs to be self-aware, woke, nor with the times to be perfect TV.
Things are still largely the same in the Candice Bushnell cinematic universe. There are lunches at fabulous restaurants with empty tables, martinis, and Carrie still subsists on corner store coffee and takeout.
This brave new world, however, does have fast-casual dining.
Oh, we need a setting for Miranda to tell her best friends that she’s leaving her husband of two decades, you say? I know just the spot!
What says “woman on the verge” more than a plate of king crab legs?
You can’t name a single thing.
And honestly, like I’m barely joking at this point. Sometimes you need to spend $31 on crab at a restaurant that only has bar seating and announce your divorce to friends, passers-by, and bearded staff alike. I’m not sure whether this particular seafood concept market stall has guys with beanies and beards, or guys with trucker hats, but either way they’re listening.
Overall, I can’t complain because I love watching TV more than I love being happy. But if I were to complain maybe just a tiny bit, I would say that we don’t really have to be doing french fry shame in the year of our lord 2022.
Emeril Update
It appears the Emeril Air Fryer has been taken to court, but realheads know that Martha Stewart owns the Emeril Brand. Stay tuned!