I don't get it

When I came home from work the other morning, there wasn't much on TV. The channel that carried "Blind Date" had gone south of a while, so I stopped at "Sex and the City."

I heard this show received some accolades, so I thought I'd sit through it despite the fact that Sarah Jessica Parker plays a prominent role. (She was cute in "Square Pegs" all those years ago, but I'm sure Matthew Broderick married her for her personality)

The praise for the show was off target. It seems to me the plot is bunch of selfish, confused, rich women who seek sex, sex and more sex (thus the show's title, right?). Nothing wrong with that, I admit, and it's the premise of many a good porn film, but here it gets old (like the characters) pretty fast. This one trick pony (well, it does have Tawny Catain who starred in "Bachelor Party" with that donkey scene) finished its act in the first five minutes I saw.

OK, perhaps I saw one bad episode. In the spirit of fairness, I flipped from "Blind Date" the next night to watch it again. Same old, same old. Very old.

It seems the producers were trying to mimic the "Friends" experience, but this time with older characters. The writing wasn't there and the pettiness was just painful. "Seinfeld" pulled off the minutia bit pretty well, building episodes on the high-talker, the man-hands, the Jerry-forgetting-his-girlfriend's-name (Mulva?), for example, but "Sex and the City" missed it, especially in this one scene:

It was a cocktail party and one of characters came in crying. All her friends surrounded her in a bathroom stall and asked her what the problem was. She said her boyfriend had a small penis. That's the scene. Come on, Hollywood. They're at a cock-tail party! Play this out. Why didn't they put her near one of those tables with the tiny hot dogs, or some other visual element, and instead of coming out and saying it, use props and witty dialog to make it funny.

If I want to watch a bunch of superficial rich people worry about where their next orgasm comes from, I can watch CNN any time for the real stuff.

Thought: I should know better than to believe the praises of "Entertainment Tonight."