Will Carrie Bradshaw Learn the Lessons of Butt-Head?

Producers have just announced that the long-anticipated Sex and the City movie has finally gotten the official green light, with all four original stars signing on after much wringing of well-manicured hands over the years. It’s clearly a bit late for the project to get under way, so today’s announcement begs for a little light historical analysis of the time-honored practice of milking hit shows to their last, overhyped drop.

The good: Many good-but-not-great TV shows have transformed into fantastic movies. Take South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, Beavis and Butt-Head Do America, and The Naked Gun, all of which outshone their original series by taking the shows’ original cartoonish subject matter and blowing it up to a big-screen level of buffoonery that audiences loved. Perhaps Sex and the City’s producers would be wise to consider turning Samantha Jones into a huge talking vagina.

The bad: Filmed adaptations that fell flat, such as the woeful Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Bewitched (even the heroic Will Ferrell couldn’t save this one), and Jerry Springer starrer Ringleader, misfired because of a total lack of understanding of what made the originals great (Sherilynn Fenn, subtle feminism, and spying on white-trash America in the comfort of your own home, in that order). From this viewpoint, to make Sex and the City the stuff of cinematic legend, filmmakers would be wise to hone in on the — wait, what was so great about Sex and the City again? —Sara Cardace