Netflix's Pretend It's a City

When I started doing The Reader's Corner on 4 Cents a Podcast as a full-length, weekly episode--purely on the recommendation of my friend Will Goldschmidt--I basically began it with the intention of featuring some of my favorite authors. It gave me a perfect excuse to read, especially to read shorter works that I could feature on an episode in totality. And this "series-within-a-series" features some of the most popular and most-streamed episodes in the show

What I didn't expect is that the single most popular episode of the show, period, would be the episode The Reader's Corner: The Fran Lebowitz Reader. In the last two months, this episode has garnered over a fifth of the listens for 4 Cents, and it's all because I re-shared it when Netflix released Pretend It's a City on their platform.

I love the works of Fran Lebowitz, and I love her as a personality. I've never met the woman, nor do I ever expect to meet her. Without a doubt though, she is a national treasure, and we're lucky to have her with us. So when, early last month, Netflix released a special, one-off mini-series featuring her titled Pretend It's a City, I immediately started watching it. 

I have since re-watched it about 4 times, and I'm still not sick of it. 

Though Lebowitz first came to prominence as a writer, with books like Metropolitan Life and Social Studies, since 1994, which saw the release of both The Fran Lebowitz Reader and her children's book Mr. Chas and Lisa Sue Meet the Pandas, she's been best known as a lecturer and social commendatory personality. Thankfully, none of her books have ever been out of print, so readers have always been able to find her work and get to know her inimitable voice on the page.

In 2010, Martin Scorsese profiled and introduced Lebowitz to a whole new generation through his HBO Documentary Public Speaking. Now, he's done it again, 11 years later, by directing and producing this mini-series.

Like Public Speaking, Pretend It's a City is a shameless profile of Lebowitz's personality and unique way at looking at the world. Unlike Public Speaking, which does goes into the important events of her life, the real subject of Pretend...isn't Lebowitz herself, but her views on certain subjects.

Each of the 7 episodes broadly features Fran's take on a given topic. In episode one, it's New York City, in general. In episode two, it's the shifts that have occurred around her, culturally, as she's lived in New York all these decades. In the next, we get her views on New York's Public Transport services--and so on and so forth. This topic focused-format gives each episode its own coherence. Bookending each of Fran's hot-takes is Scorsese's choice in editing and sound design featuring the landscape and soundscape that many associate with New York City itself. Thus, each episode also works like a mini-panorama of pre-pandemic New York.

Aside from the sheer joy everyone in this show clearly experiences, that's probably one of the greatest appeals of this show. It features a world that many people are beginning to remember with through the haze of nostalgia: the world before COVID-19. There are scenes of crowd-packed theaters, people standing and sitting close to one another, without facemasks, and scenes in restaurants. It's a seven episode portrait of the world I, and I'm sure everyone who watches it, would love nothing more than to re-inhabit. 

Related to that, my favorite part of this series though, has to be the overriding celebration of friendship. Particularly in the scenes between Scorsese and Lebowitz, you can so clearly see that happiness and fun each of them get just being in one another's company. The best of this celebration, however, comes in the final episode (and my personal favorite), titled "Library Services". This episode features clips of interviews between the late, great Toni Morrison and Fran Lebowitz, whom some might know were great friends, despite their total differences in personality, which you can see in those interviews. Morrison comes off a sagacious and sweet, Lebowitz, acidic and sharp. Yet, like her relationship with Scorsese, the relationship is one of mutual admiration for those very differences. In a tender confirmation of this friendship, at the end of that episode we see a special dedication to Toni Morrison.

If you looking for a short, binge-able show, that will make you laugh a lot, think a little, and leave you feeling good and wanting more, Pretend It's a City might well be your next favorite thing. 

(As a bonus, if you'd like an idea of the personality you'll be in for, check out this wonderful interview of Lebowitz from YouTube below.)