Eugene David<br>...The One-Minute Pundit

Posted 5:37 PM by Gene

Even in TRIB SYNERGY CITY, where every exec is licking his chops over the airing of SLUTSVILLE despite it being unsalable without the jackhammering of corporate-partner TWXSTERS and further being heavily censored and going full bore into the teeth of a fierce regulatory gale, even THEN, a TRIB HACK admits, well, maybe it wasn't the greatest thing since the sun and the stars:

For every successful one of the scores of "Seinfeld"-esque attempts to coin phrases ("manthrax," for a toxic guy; "modelizer," for a serial dater of models), there were, seemingly, hundreds of really bad puns, back-of-Reader's-Digest material presented as clever (Carrie to Big: "If you're tired, you take a nap-a, you don't move to Napa").

For all the saving grace of Parker, who can go from pratfall to emotional devastation in a New York minute, and for all the less sparkly, more subtle talents of Nixon and Davis, there was Cattrall's Samantha. The problem was the actress' inability to truly inhabit her character, a disservice to the idea of a sexually aggressive woman; against three relatively realistic counterparts, Cattrall, with her fakey-fake voice and slapstick bedroom contortions, forever seemed to be playing a caricature rather than a person.

And every time the series seemed to welcome you by approaching some universal truth about dating (Carrie discovering she has become so jaded about love that when then-new guy Aidan won't sleep with her right away, it never enters her mind that he's being romantic), it pushed you away with its insularity, shocking even by the usual standards of New York celebrants.

This is not only a show that kept insisting - desperately, really - on the greatness of New York, it's a show that, in the trademark Woody Allen manner, stripped the city of that greatness by taking away minorities, the outer boroughs, people who consider tossing a few hundred dollars at a pair of designer shoes stupid or, worse, unaffordable. Instead we got Carrie, at the end of Season Four, season four, happily telling viewers about transvestite hookers: "Don't worry, they have a very lovely, happy life."

Of course they do. Hooking is like that.

AND SO IS NEWSPAPERING.