Everyone Needs to Chill About Gen Z Watching ‘Sex and the City’

Exactly two weeks after I was born, Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) and her girls took to the stands at Yankee Stadium to gossip about big balls, whine about not being allowed to smoke in Giuliani’s NYC, and devour hot dogs (wink, wink). There I was, in front of the TV, unable to sit up straight, hold down food, or understand anything these four women were talking about. And yet, at just 14 days old, I couldn’t help but wonder if I had just become the world’s youngest Sex and the City fan.

Alright, that’s not how everything went down. I started watching Sex and the City in 2018, at age 19, after a friend couldn’t stop raving about it. I’m rewatching it now—on Max, obviously, where it’s been since the platform launched as HBO Max. But when recently Netflix added the series to its library, a whole “Gen Z has never seen Sex and the City and they aren’t ready!!” discourse began with it.

Still: I was there, people! I, a 24-year-old Gen Z woman, was alive when Sex and the City was originally airing. Maybe I was watching Arthur the aardvark instead of watching Charlotte (Kristin Davis) bang a troubled man named Arthur. People on the internet—and, more specifically, millennials—need to stop assuming that my generation and I 1.) have never seen an episode and 2.) are not ready for it to be problematic.

Not only did we grow up seeing the show on our parents’ TV screens—later on in life, we grew up in the streaming era, when everything became available all the time. After all, us Gen Z folk are the ones teaching our Gen X parents the difference between HBO, HBO Go, HBO Now, HBO Max, and Max so that they can actually rewatch Sex and the City. So: Why would Gen Z be watching Sex and the City for the first time?

Watching HBO content has been a trendy part of Gen Z culture. The Zoomers have enjoyed tuning in to watch Succession, The White Lotus, and Euphoria weekly with live reactions on social media. Plus, Max has been pushing Sex and the City up in the algorithm for the past year thanks to the show’s 25th anniversary. Plus, it’s not like Sex and the City has been totally off the air and out of the zeitgeist in recent years—And Just Like That premiered in 2021.

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Alas, no, according to the internet; apparently Gen Z audiences just flip on Netflix and click whatever is on the front page. That’s how streaming trends work. (Well, I must confess, I actually do this. But you get my point! Let’s not all pretend like Gen Z has had zero access to Max.)

All this aside, there are a handful of Gen Z who haven't seen the show. Some Zoomers do only have access to Netflix, or use it as the primary platform. I can’t sit here pretending that everyone in the world is like me—an entertainment reporter with a subscription to pretty much every streaming service sans, I don’t know, FuboTV?—and that everyone in my generation has seen Sex and the City.

But that being said, the anticipatory remarks made online ahead of Netflix unleashing Sex and the City—unleashing, I say, like the show is about four feral beasts who ravage Manhattan—on Gen Z are so over the top. “Can Gen Z Even Handle Sex and the City?” wondered a Vanity Fair article which claims that Gen Z will cancel Carrie Bradshaw with a flurry of Substack essays. Variety posed a similar question to the culture, asking what the “ultimate period piece” might mean to Gen Z; the piece ultimately suggested that Gen Z, once again, will try to cancel the girls for their toxic dating habits and actions that aren’t politically correct enough for 2024.

Enough! Does everyone over the age of 27 think that Gen Z wakes up every day intent on making some sort of cancellation? Ah, yes, my favorite weekend hobby: canceling made-up TV characters. Seriously— leave that to Warner Bros. Discovery, which tends to literally cancel every TV show I enjoy.

And do these writers think we were born yesterday, and that Gen Z has never encountered a problematic show? We were raised with Glee. I watched Girls when it was still airing weekly on HBO. Most members of Gen Z still fawn over The Office, even episodes where Michael Scott says some pretty questionable things about two Asian waitresses from the local Benihana. This isn’t our first trip to the eyebrow-raising rodeo.

Most of these critics—both above are men, and neither are Gen Z—forecasting Gen Z’s reactions to Sex and the City are also totally off-base. Gen Z critic Lydia Spencer-Elliott re-reviewed the show for The Guardian in light of it joining the Netflix catalog, writing, “It’s relatively progressive. I’ve never heard a group of women talking about shagging this much in any other show. It’s not lost on me and my friends how revolutionary their chats about oral sex and -masturbation would have been when first aired.”

Or take a look at this recent Reddit thread, started by a self-proclaimed millennial, which begins the conversation with: “Thoughts on Gen Z not coping with SATC.” (Not coping with Sex and the City? We’re not being forced to watch it.) Nevertheless, a handful of Gen Z Reddit users have chimed in on this thread to shut down ideas that our generation hates the show, like this comment: “I have rewatched the series more times than I will admit or can even count right now.”

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Another Reddit user who states they were born in 2003 writes on that same thread that, “a lot of women my age LOVE satc.” Another user, who says they were born in 2005, continues, “I’m gen z too! Born in 2005 and I absolutely love this show. I too acknowledge moments that haven’t really aged well but that doesn’t make me hate the series. I appreciate flawed characters like Carrie and I’d never cancel her. Cringing at these moments only makes me glad that we’re progressing as a society. It doesn’t make me dismiss the show.”

One comment right below that really hits the bull’s-eye: “The constant conversations about Millennials, Boomers, Gen Z is just a way to divide us, and it’s frustrating it works so well.” I couldn’t have said it any better.

Plus, do we all think that just one generation—only millennials—led the charge on the And Just Like That Che Diaz memes entirely on their own? Hell no. That was a multi-generational movement. (But also: Bring Che back!) Just because Gen Z wasn’t old enough to watch Sex and the City or Girls when they originally aired doesn’t mean we’re not caught up on TV herstory. We are, however, waiting on our own generation to reinvent that classic formula.

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