All US television is Trumpy now, even when it’s not

When a television show gives a large portion of screen time to a subplot about a case of mistaken identity, you know it’s run out of ideas.

When the identity in question is a dog – dignity prevents me from going into more detail – you know it has become what USA Today calls “deeply unnecessary”.

“Deeply unnecessary”: Sarah Jessica Parker reprises her role as Carrie in And Just Like That, back for another season but the plot lines are thinning.Credit:

So it is with the third season of And Just Like That, the dubious, middle-aged sequel to the genuinely iconic Sex and the City series, which ran for six seasons from 1998 to 2004.

SATC was a celebration of female friendship, a vanguard television show centring on four women frankly discussing their dating and sex lives. Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte worked hard in their various careers and found meaning in the pursuit of love, without making it their reason for being. It was not overtly political but it was on the zeitgeist.

Kelly Lawler, who reviewed the just-released season three of AJLT for USA Today, wrote that SATC was “inextricable” from its ’90s and early ’00s setting, “a commentary on that time in our culture as sexual morals shifted, and the series pushed back against stereotypes about single women”.

By contrast, AJLT inhabits a universe strangely divorced from contemporary times, except for the multitude of excruciating ways the show depicts the now fifty-something protagonists struggling to keep up with modern “woke” culture. Said culture is undeniably a product of US politics over the past decade or so, culminating in the grand backlash of the second Trump administration. But none of that rates a mention in AJLT.

“Hints of inner spiritual desolation”: Jon Hamm in Your Friends & Neighbours.Credit: Apple TV+

Carrie, a writer who is now trying her hand at fiction, apparently has no writerly friends in her milieu who notice they are living in an era of book-banning, the repression of universities and other incursions on freedom of speech. Likewise, Miranda, who had a midlife career crisis and quit her job as a corporate lawyer to do something human rights-y, doesn’t seem to have clocked the civil rights abuses of the Trump administration. Restrictions on abortion access are of no concern to this supposedly strident feminist.

But why be a scold, right? We never came to Sex and the City or even And Just Like That for the politics. We came for fun and frippery, stupid stilettos and nights out in the cocktail bars of Manhattan. The only problem is that in a cost-of-living and inequality crisis it now feels a little icky the way these women spend money like it’s 2000, and dress solely in the latest-season designer clothes, as product-placed by the marketing teams of those design houses. Carrie is wearing an actual bonnet in one scene.

In the original SATC era we wanted to join the wealthy and aspirational foursome for a drink, but now the zeitgeist has turned. The television shows that feel most relevant to the moment, and which are the most engaging, are all about the suffering and the immorality of the super-rich.

It feels more comfortable, now, to reassure ourselves that while billionaires and tech-bro oligarchs appear to be running the world, they’re living lives of miserable inauthenticity.

It started with Succession, a brilliant and darkly funny exposition of the ways in which inherited wealth can corrupt family relationships. The creator of Succession, Jesse Armstrong, has just released a movie, Mountainhead, about a foursome of tech billionaires who hole up in a mountain mansion in Utah as the world seems to be ending.

More recently we have Your Friends & Neighbours, starring Mad Men’s Jon Hamm, a square-jawed hero of all-American good looks but with just enough despair in his face to hint at inner spiritual desolation. Hamm plays Coop, a one-percenter hedge fund manager enraged by his divorce (his wife left him for his good friend), who loses his job after a low-level sexual indiscretion at work.

In order to maintain his lifestyle (which includes $4500 skin treatments for his daughter and $30,000 tables at charity galas), he resorts to stealing from his friends and neighbours.

These people, who live in a fictional, highly manicured wealth conclave outside New York City, are so obscenely rich that they have $200,000 watches and rolls of cash lying around in drawers.

Hamm does what he has to do – he becomes a cat burglar with a cynical philosophy.

Coop is just a man trying to get by, and if that doesn’t involve selling his Maserati, or getting a new (albeit less well paid) job, then it is a testament to the show’s good writing that we are still with him, even when we question his attachment to a lifestyle he purports to disdain.

Another new American show, Sirens, stars Julianne Moore as the beautiful philanthropist wife of a billionaire hedge-fund manager, who is summering in her uber-mansion (it has a turret) on an unnamed east-coast big-money island similar to Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard.

She has a creepy, co-dependent relationship with her young personal assistant, who comes from poverty and dysfunction but who is loved in a way her wealthy boss never will be.

Of course, these shows have a buck each way – they seek to satirise the super-rich and expose the underlying emptiness of their lives, while allowing us the vicarious experience of living in their luxury for an hour or so. The Hollywood Reporter calls it “affluence porn”.

We get access to the calfskin-lined interior of the private jet. We get to enjoy the week-long wedding festivities in Tuscany and gawp at the marvellous outfits, all while judging the protagonists for their materialism. In AJLT the materialism is not there to be judged; it is an integral part of the fun.

Perhaps AJLT feels off because the writing is bad, and the plot lines so tired that dogs must be enlisted to prop up the action. Or maybe it is because in the second Trump administration the US political environment has become so oppressive and so inescapable that no story feels true unless it references it, however obliquely.

Jacqueline Maley is an author and columnist.