Cynthia Nixon recently sat down with The New York Times to state, unequivocally and with the bravery of a woman who knows her lighting angles, that she "loved" Miranda Hobbes’s fumbling, catastrophic attempts to become "woke" in the Sex and the City reboot. The actress acknowledged that fans were "horrified" by the character’s choices. Reading this confession from my private cabana, I could only nod in solemn, sun-drenched solidarity. Nixon is right. Miranda is right. And the audience, as usual, is simply too poor and too anchored to their pedestrian lives to understand the luxury of blowing up your own universe on a whim.
I was discussing this very phenomenon over a rather aggressive Sancerre with a source close to the production at Balthazar last week. We agreed that the discourse around Miranda’s evolution has become unbearably tedious. The viewers sitting at home, watching on televisions they likely financed, seem to believe that a fifty-something corporate lawyer should simply remain a fifty-something corporate lawyer. They are terrified of growth. They are horrified by a woman who looks at her stable, loving marriage and her predictable Brooklyn brownstone and decides, correctly, that she would rather be having panic attacks in a Los Angeles comedy club.
Let us address the elephant in the room: Steve Brady. The fans wept for Steve, a man whose primary personality trait was making his own furniture and being pleasant. In this economy? Grow up. Miranda leaving her hearing-impaired, perfectly nice husband to follow a non-binary, weed-smoking podcast host to the West Coast is not a character assassination. It is the most authentic, aspirational feminist act of the decade. Only the truly elite have the financial liquidity to casually discard a twenty-year emotional investment because a comedian touched their hand in a kitchen. The audience’s horror is just jealousy disguised as media criticism.
Then there is the matter of Miranda’s clumsy pivot to human rights law, which involved her stumbling through a labyrinth of racial microaggressions in a graduate seminar. Fans called it "cringe." I call it a masterclass in lived vulnerability. Of course Miranda didn't know how to speak to her Black professor without sounding like a panicked HR training video from 1998. She is a wealthy white Manhattanite stepping outside her bubble for the first time in two decades. You cannot expect someone in that tax bracket to navigate intersectionality flawlessly unless they have attended a private DEI seminar at a boutique wellness retreat in Sedona.
What the viewers fail to grasp is that their discomfort is the point. Prestige television is not here to make the working class feel secure in their monogamy; it is here to remind them that their lives lack narrative velocity.
The audience’s profound revulsion is not a failure of our writing, but an internal KPI showing us exactly how effectively we are dismantling their pedestrian moral frameworks.
Watching Nixon on the press tour for this rollout has been nothing short of inspiring. She has stood on the red carpet, flanked by publicists, and calmly explained to the masses that their beloved, cynical, pragmatic Miranda is gone, replaced by a jittery activist who doesn't know how to use her phone. It takes a monumental amount of privilege to look your entire fanbase in the eye and tell them they are wrong to want the thing they tuned in to see. I respect it immensely. It reminds me of the time I had to fire my personal chef because he refused to understand my sudden, non-negotiable pivot to pescatarianism.
Ultimately, the viewers who claim they "miss the old Miranda" are telling on themselves. They want a character who reflects their own stagnant, compromise-filled existences. They want someone who stays in the unhappy marriage, keeps the corporate job, and dies quietly in Brooklyn. But Miranda Hobbes has transcended such small, middle-class concerns. She is rich, she is confused, and she is making everyone around her miserable in the name of self-discovery. If you cannot find the beauty in that, I suggest you go back to watching broadcast television.