Is it her or me?

Current mood: shaken to the core (well, maybe a little)

What happened to Carrie Bradshaw? I used to love her so. Well, actually, what I loved was the ensemble acting on SATC, the tart storylines, and some of the oddly realistic reflections on the single life, or life in general - I never really liked her being pushed as the show's center. Maybe I only liked it on HBO, where they could actually show and tell about s*x in graphic terms and images; maybe the whole point was to be frank and shocking. I never realized that I could HATE these characters in their sanitized, censored, made-for-slightly-after-primetime network TV incarnations, but I do. Samantha and Charlotte have become slightly officious and unlikeable caricatures, Miranda is (well, is still mostly fun, but a bit excessively) shrill and shrewish, and Carrie...well, I want to constantly jab her with pointy things!!! Things that were fine and quirky before, well, I can't take it any more. OH THE CLOTHES!!!! OH THE HATS!!! OH THE ME!ME!ME! passive-aggressive, emotionally f*cktarded, immature and insistent drama-queening! Her pancake makeup, head-tilting, screechy-whiny excuse for "acting" and "womanhood" makes me want to throw hard things (pillows sometimes just don't cut it) at my television set. Hmmm. Maybe my issues are with SJP... still, I used to adore this show. Maybe it's because the stories simply can't survive the flow interruption due to commercial breaks. Maybe the gals really do have to be able to say c*ck, c*nt, j*zz, f*ck, etc., to drive home the "realism." Maybe it's because my tastes have changed (I'm not sure about that, though. I am still loyal to Buffy, and I've loved her longer.), though at this point, it makes me question why a show about a nauseatingly annoying woman whining was ever interesting to me.

I guess the easy answer would be to stop watching; peel my eyes away from the trainwreck. And mostly, I do avoid the WB between 11 and 11:30 (among other times, basically being all but Gilmorean hour). Still, sometimes I flip by and think, "Hey that episode was good..." and get sucked in, only to find that it's been utterly destroyed and now devoid of wit, humor and charm. Maybe the reason I keep watching is because I want to reassure myself that I wasn't grossly wrong as to have liked this show during its first run. But so far? Not so much. Sigh, another illusion of the past shattered :(