You know, after the Covid crisis, Brexit, Trump, Labour’s antisemitism meltdown and the return of skinny jeans, I thought I’d hardened my hide to bad news. But a new development might finally break me: it was recently confirmed that And Just Like That, the rebooted Sex And The City , will include references to the pandemic. According to Sarah Jessica Parker, the show’s star and executive producer, “It will obviously be part of the storyline, because that’s the city [the characters] live in.”

Now, I have two issues with this, and one of them is about Sex And The City, and the other is about the pandemic. Let’s deal with the former first. The appalling SATC films already proved that Michael Patrick King, SATC’s director, writer and producer, and Parker completely misunderstood their show, given that they jettisoned all the things that made the series so great – the smart scripts, the respect for the characters – and replaced them with jokes about how all a woman needs is a walk-in closet and how weird the Middle East is. So Parker and King didn’t really get the appeal of their own show: that doesn’t make much sense, but neither did Carrie getting back together with Mr Big. So fine: we soldier on somehow.

But referencing the pandemic “because that’s the city they live in”? Never mind understanding her show, has Parker ever watched it? Providing a realistic depiction of New York City was never what SATC was about, given that it focused on a newspaper columnist who lives in an Upper East Side brownstone and wears couture. Despite being on air from 1998-2004, do you know what was never mentioned once on the show? 9/11. And thank God. I didn’t watch Sex And The City to see reality reflected back at me: I watched it to escape that.

How would today’s grimness even fit within the fantastical framework? (Incidentally, Samantha will always be in the show for me, even if the producers have also confirmed she won’t be a character in And Just Like That. As I said, I deal in fantasy.)

Opening scene: the women are on Zoom.

Carrie [in Dior couture]: “Hi girls! Oh my God, we’re Zooming!”

Samantha: “The only Zoom I’m interested in is my new vibrator. Thank God for online deliveries – and delivery men.” Hunky delivery man appears over her shoulder, apparently naked.

Charlotte: “Samantha! You’re supposed to maintain social distance!”

Miranda tries to speak, but she is on mute.

Samantha: “Oh relax, we kept our masks on. Those masks are so kinky, don’t you think?”

Carrie: “All I’ve done today is count my shoes. But Samantha knows how to put the big O into Covid-19.”

Samantha: “I had 19 orgasms before breakfast!”

Miranda tries to speak, is still on mute.

SATC’s switch from not mentioning 9/11 in 2001 to very much mentioning the pandemic in 2021 reflects a shift in what audiences now want from art: for it to reflect us, both in terms of representation (a good thing) and reality (overrated, in my personal opinion.) So we need to brace ourselves for the pandemic that is to come next: art about the lockdown.

Of course novelists, film-makers, playwrights and musicians will be tempted to make lockdown art. None of us has done anything for the past 10 zillion months; what else would they make art about? Artists are supposed to engage with the times, and also, lockdown is so easily translated into art: “people trapped in a room together” is a pretty good description of most plays, while “person is trapped in their own thoughts while they confront mortality and their own petty desires” is every single modern novel. Art often reflects its time, and that’s good. Just not when it’s a time that I’d really like not to think about for a while.

When reading Patricia Lockwood’s new novel last month, No One Is Talking About This, I felt the small bloom of a migraine I thought had gone for good, after the narrator mentioned Donald Trump. Similarly, 2018 turned out to be too soon to read a novel about Brexit, as I found out after a bad bout of insomnia sparked by reading Middle England by Jonathan Coe before bed.

I don’t have a hardline rule against art about painful recent events. Staying up all night to read Jonathan Safran Foer’s 9/11 novel, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, was one of the most cathartic experiences of my life, because I was in New York on 9/11 and a close friend was killed. But that was a decade after it happened, which was about how long it took before I could bear to read or watch anything about 9/11.

Look, it has been a tough time, and we all need a holiday, and if we can’t take an actual one, we should at least get one in our imaginations. We want to relive the roaring 1920s, not have a miserable self-reflective 2020s. So film-makers, screenwriters, novelists: you really don’t need to acknowledge the pandemic. It’s fine. We know you know it happened. We’ve all lived through it, and for now, that’s enough.

• Hadley Freeman and Tim Dowling will be in conversation on 25 February at 8pm. Find details and £5 tickets for their live streamed event at membership.theguardian.com.