OK but will they eat this time?
Welcome to #EmerilHive, a weeklyish newsletter by Becca Thimmesch. Have you subscribed?
Everything old—I’m told—is new again. The cadre of teenage girls who loiter outside of Tesco are wearing Limited Too and heeled flip flops. My boyfriend has a mullet. Gossip Girl AND Sex and the City are back.
I haven’t watched the new Gossip Girl yet because I’ve been weirdly, shockingly busy and have had no time for my beloved television. But I’ve been dutifully poring over the Instagram gossip. As for Sex and the City, I’m knee-deep in the discourse and waiting with bated breath for a premiere. Aside from scrolling, I’ve certainly been thinking.
Everyone wants to know how both Gossip Girl and SATC, two shows that have aged notoriously poorly, are going to move forward and adapt for an audience as online as this. Will they nod to their past foibles? Personally, I don’t care. I’m just curious as to where they’re going to eat.
Both shows were guilty—to varying degrees—of that sort of early to mid-2000s cultural thinness. Food was discussed, lauded, and even shown, but rarely eaten. Characters could be seen at or discussing some of Manhattan’s most acclaimed and exclusive restaurants, their plates always just out of frame.
Let’s take Blair Waldorf. For Blair, food was, at least outwardly, a status symbol. Cappuccinos and croissants were part of a Hepburn cosplay, macaron had to be from Ladurée or you might as well have just hung a sign on your chest that read “I’m poor.” But Blair, quite famously, didn’t actually eat anything. Her eating disorder was referenced in the abstract past, her former “problem” cured by daily visits to some UES specialist. In the early seasons, this Doctor (??) was referenced frequently by her mother in pleas for Blair to eat something, pleas that were then placated by a single grape.
Serena Van der Woodsen, Blair’s foil in everything, was supposed to be the breezy, up-for anything counterpart. She talked about burgers! But apart from an ill-fated grilled cheese with Chuck Bass, Serena was rarely eating either. One of the longest running commentaries on the show was about breakfast, mounds of which were prepared at what would have to be an ungodly hour, all for the teens to grab a single pastry or slice of canteloupe before jetting off to like, go to another borough before school started. Lily, Serena’s mother, was always begging her to stay and sit and eat breakfast with her family (Bart Bass), sighing as her daughter skipped yet another meal. Yet I have to wonder, if Serena had actually sat and loaded up her plate, or god forbid grew out of her sample size clothes, would Lily have been so happy after all?
[Kristin Bell voice] And poor Rufus Humphrey, doting Dad and aging rockstar, the only parent without staff, always trying to get his kids to join him for a big bowl of pasta or a plate of pancakes. I loved when Rufus made his famous pasta sauce because of the way they always stage red sauce on TV: a giant, simmering pot, a big wooden spoon coated with ultra-viscous prop sauce up to like, the mid-handle, always being offered as a taster to some guest or love interest. Perfect viewing.
The new Gossip Girl has promised to be less egregious, more woke, more modern. The teens will be “grappling” with their immense wealth and privilege, a concept I find personally hilarious. I imagine there will still be references to top bars and restaurants, but I pray that there might be a stray Sweetgreen eaten on the steps of the Met, or an outer borough scholarship student showing up with an embarrassing bowl of Chop’t. I expect heavy-handed references to oat milk and commentaries on veganism. I’m sure that the interminable dialectic between our screens and our smaller screens will mean that they’ll throw us a side-character who’s like, a size 8, and do something truly terrible about “mid-size” representation. And I’ll probably lap it up like a pig in a trough. Oink oink!
Gossip Girl is a show about teens for teens. Sex and the City, on the other hand, is a show about women in their 30s and 40s and it’s for Girls and Gays of all ages. These women have nothing and everything in common with the teens-played-by-adults who come on the scene around the time of Carrie’s wedding (yes, I believe these to exist in the same cinematic universe). I imagine that respective real estate tycoons Big and Bart Bass are professionally acquainted, and that the girls might perhaps gaze on a Serena pap as they get around to flipping through the Star to read Carrie’s column. But a principle lesson we can all perhaps take from SATC is not to concern yourselves with what the teens are up to.
Sex and the City is about women doing what they are meant to do: go out to eat and have fun. And it’s (mostly) glorious.
Like most elements of the show, it’s better if you simply just don’t worry too much about it. Yes, to an extent, it was radical and refreshing to see women on TV eat all the time and not focus too much on it. It’s nice to see Carrie and Miranda walk around eating pizza and drinking milkshakes. It’s fun that meals are a place for them to gather, to talk, and to support each other through life’s moments from divorce to dating a bisexual guy. It doesn’t have to go much further than that.
In googling around, I found this Vogue essay which I originally assumed had come out in 2011, not 2021, in which it’s argued that SATC supplants diet culture for a sort of fantastical, aspirational world where women can eat whatever they want and diet talk is a rare, unwanted and unwarranted inclusion. It’s only in the caveats—you know, the ones you always have to put in when you write about SATC—where we get to the meat of it: sure, everybody’s in perfect shape and they’re all white and etc etc etc. It’s the kind of conclusion you get to draw when you’re a thin person who, sure, is influenced by diet culture. But it’s fundamentally not radical for a thin woman to enjoy a slice of pizza. Harry Goldenblatt is the closest thing we see to anything remotely boundary-pushing, as he enjoys smeared bagels and second helpings at a Hampton's buffet, but the entire bit is that he’s disgusting, so it’s a land of contrasts.
Our four heroines are allowed to enjoy their meals because they maintain visible abs and Michelle Obama arms. When Miranda fails to shed her baby weight or Samantha gains a few stress pounds, they lose their tenuous grasp on that privilege. Everyone accept Carrie has a devoted on-screen workout routine, and Charlotte maintains her overall reputation as Least Transgressive One by repeatedly restricting herself, criticizing her body, and obsessing over calories burned.
But it’s at least true that while diet culture may not be less pervasive, it’s less discussed. And not everything needs to be radical all the time! Sometimes you just want to watch a good show with an excellent theme song to satiate that little craving in your brain.
But, like Gossip Girl, the good people at HBO Max want to make sure that we know that they know that SATC didn’t age well. They’ve promised that the show will modernize, although without Sam Jones I’m not sure how modern it could possibly be.
I predict that our foursome-turned-threesome will largely carry the torch of not cooking into this decade. Big might make a meal or two, as he is known to do, but Carrie will still subsist on lavish meals and street hot dogs. I pray to god she vapes. I envision Miranda on an iron-clad HelloFresh schedule, blowing up at Steve when the called-for garlic clove is left out of the shipment. Charlotte, the domestic one, is obviously googling things like “healthy Jewish recipes” and making valiant but flat attempts at the regional cuisine of her adopted daughter’s birth (take that, Trey!!). I see Via Carota, noted SJP favorite, making an appearance, with some throwback references to Il Cantinori or Magnolia, both of which can credit the show with their success. I hope brunch gets updated to somewhere with slightly more personality, and I wish for nothing more than for Carrie to drag a tired Big to Mr. Purple for a night out. I imagine that Charlotte will have a preferred $30 dollar workout class, with Miranda resisting any innovation in the field of exercise, lamenting the price of Williamsburg gyms these days. Carrie’s routine will continue to elude, minus being dragged to F45.
Aidan will be vegan and I cannot elaborate.
Another Week
Jesus Christ I am tired. Since we last spoke, I hosted a perfect barbecue even though someone brought an un-asked for dessert and put it out before I could put my cobbler in the oven. My wonderful friend Laith is here so we went to Dom’s Subs for its famed vegan sub and it was truly, shockingly good. We also went to Dishoom which you know, was perfect. I went to Brighton and wasn’t impressed with the outdoor offerings, and as I’m hoping not to get COVID this week, meant that I was extremely hungry all day. I made multiple big sandwiches for an all-day punting trip that went absolutely perfectly until I fell and hurt myself with maybe twenty minutes left on the outing. Yes I am in a sling, no you do not need to worry about me at all. I finally read Grand Union and it was excellent. I pruned about half of my nasturtiums and am rocking a truly alarming number of infusions in my bar cart.
Emeril Update
Can someone check on him and let me know if he’s ok?