Thanks to Sex and the City, the cosmopolitan became the cocktail of choice for groups of best girlfriends adventuring around New York City — but not for the ladies of Sweet Magnolias. As you can see in the first nine minutes of Season 5, when Dana Sue (Brooke Elliott) and Helen (Heather Headley) head to the Big Apple to visit Maddie (Joanna Garcia Swisher), they toast to their girls’ trip (and Maddie’s new publishing job) with a trio of margaritas.
You can take the girls out of Serenity, but you can’t take the Serenity out of the girls. While their families continue life as usual in South Carolina, the Magnolias make the most of the gorgeous NYC weather by shopping; checking out a musical (“I do like a good musical,” says Helen, who is portrayed by Tony and Grammy winner Headley); and visiting Maddie’s favorite place in the city: the Alice in Wonderland statue in Central Park.
That’s also creator Sheryl J. Anderson’s favorite place in the city. “When we were looking at the New York episode, I was like, ‘Well, certainly we should go here,’” she tells Tudum. “Alice is a metaphor for the whole season: Maddie dives in and things get topsy-turvy and friends don’t seem to be who they were. It was such a great metaphor, so we decided we would follow it all the way through.”
While previous seasons of Sweet Magnolias have followed the three best friends as they learn how to seize their passions, the next step in their stories is chasing their dreams. As Anderson explains, “Alice in Wonderland became a fabulous metaphor for everybody chasing dreams, somebody catching them, some people finding they were changed, and some people just stumbling.”
Find out how that journey plays out when Sweet Magnolias Season 5 debuts on June 11.
