Before Sex and the City there was CBS comedy Designing Women, a TV show about four strong women running a successful interior design firm, Sugarbaker and Associates, in Atlanta, Georgia. And it’s getting a reboot.
Most die-hard fans of Sex and the City’s New York-based fictional fab four, Carrie, Charlotte, Samantha and Miranda, who filled our screens and fuelled our feminist dreams in the late ‘90s, early 2000s are probably unaware that there was actually an earlier, original fab femme four who trail-blazed the genre on late ‘80s, early ‘90s sitcom Designing Women.
The show debuted in 1986 and ran for seven highly successful seasons becoming a huge hit not only because of the fast-paced witty dialogue, strong female leads and on point storylines which covered subjects like women’s rights and domestic abuse, but also because of the fashion and beauty. Which as any Sex and the City fan will attest is one of the reasons that show was such a must-watch.
But, keep in mind, if you do go back and watch a couple of episodes of the original Designing Women series ahead of the reboot, the fashion strongly reflects the period it was set, the ‘80s and ‘90s.
As for the new series, The Hollywood Reporter reports ABC has “handed out a script commitment to what is being billed as a ‘sequel’ to the CBS comedy from original series creator Linda Bloodworth Thomason and [her husband] executive producer Harry Thomason.”
Designing Women 2.0 will follow the original format as a multi-camera comedy and will, per The Hollywood Reporter, “follow the next generation of Sugarbakers with a crop of new, young, female designers at [the] Atlanta interior design firm. The new take will still have the same razor-sharp dialogue and ability to cut through the political, cultural and social factions.”
The script will be written by Bloodworth Thomason who will also executive produce the show alongside her husband.
In a victory for the #MeToo movement, Bloodworth Thomason recently wrote a guest column in The Hollywood Reporter detailing how, although she wasn’t abused sexually, she suffered a different type of abuse in her career, alleging in the column that former CBS CEO Leslie Moonves “kept her shows off the air for seven years.”
