Now that I’m in graduate school, I have a lot of time during the day. I use this time to do reading. But I like having background noise while I work; something about its ongoing cadence keeps my brain moving as well. Sex and the City is on a lot, and so I put that on fairly often, with the volume turned down just low enough to be heard but not understood.

Making extensive use of the “Info” feature on my remote, I’ve been paying a lot of attention to the original airing dates of the episodes compared to the opening credits the networks use. Sex and the City famously changed its opening credits in the wake of 9/11, since the original featured not one, but two shots of the Twin Towers (which can hardly have been intentional, but that now presents a poetic symmetry): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31n0X6evwbM

The first shot is of the show’s title framed above the southern skyline. The only way we know which “city” is being alluded to by the title is by the very recognizable Towers; though the Brooklyn Bridge occupies much of the shot, it is nothing more than a black gash against the sky, and the rest of the buildings are anonymous in their rectangularity. The importance of the Towers as a framework is further reinforced by the second shot of them. Each main actress’ name appears in front of an essential New York landmark. Sarah Jessica Parker’s name appears first, and her landmark is the Twin Towers, rising up into the heavens (this choice of landmark is clearly meant to render Carrie as the voice of the city, for she is as connected to the Towers as the City itself is). Our first impression of the city, then, is the reinforced image of the Towers.

After 9/11, the Towers were edited out of the show’s opening credits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJOQiqRIpRM

Much like Manhattan, the rest of the credits remained the same; only the shots of the Towers were replaced. And in both shots, the Empire State Building came to stand in as the landmark that now defined Manhattan. The first shot, originally of the city seen from under the Brooklyn Bridge, was replaced with the skyline as seen from New Jersey, with the Empire State marking which “city” the title refers to. Like the Towers in the original title shot, it is the only building whose silhouette is recognizable; the rest remain shrouded in rectangular blandness. The Empire State, though, does not loom over the rest of the skyline in the way that the Twin Towers did; its iconicity, though pronounced, is more subtle. The opening credit, like the rest of Manhattan, has had its skyline lowered.

The second shot of the Towers has also been replaced with a shot of the Empire State Building. Carrie is, again, synonymous with the city, since both she and the city are associated with the same landmark. The implicit statement these new credits make, though, is that the Empire State Building has come to replace the Twin Towers as the paramount New York landmark.

If you watch Sex and the City on DVD, the episodes retain the credits they originally aired with; that is, episodes aired before 9/11 maintain their Twin Tower openings, while episodes aired after 9/11 introduce us to the show by way of the Empire State. However, if you watch Sex and the City on cable TV, every episode features the post-9/11 credits. It doesn’t matter what network you watch, the pre-9/11 credits are nowhere to be found.

The change in the credits after 9/11 was meant to mirror the change in the city’s skyline. The original credits mark a historical reality: the skyline as it once was. Just as the episodes depict the world of dating as it was in the 90s and aughts, the credits represent the skyline as it was. To air old episodes with new credits is, in a sense, to rewrite history; to pretend that the Towers never existed. Why do this?

It could be done from the same impulse that is now causing college campuses to put trigger warnings on courses. There is currently a need in America to protect ourselves from anything traumatic, but that often leads to us cocooning ourselves from even the unpleasant. Since the Twin Towers are now indelibly linked with the tragic events that led to their disappearance, to show them in the original credits would bring up traumatic memories. If the networks don’t show the original credits, then, they can’t make viewers relive past trauma.

So which is it? Do the networks show only post-9/11 credits in order to represent the changed skyline, with its absence of Towers, which is the ongoing reality of the city in which I now view the program? Or do they do it to censure reality, to protect us from a potentially traumatizing image?

I would point out that the post-9/11 slogan was “Never Forget.” In not showing the original credits, historical reality that they are, is that not what the networks are doing? Erasing the Towers from the history of TV?