Once I’d stopped laughing at the news that Sex and the City’s unfortunate sequel And Just Like That had met an untimely end – either by creative choice or by last-minute axing, depending on who you believe – I found myself awash in grief. Not for And Just Like That, which was always so thoroughly awful that its demise should really have been considered a mercy killing, but for the characters I once adored. What a sad, depleting end for the fictional Manhattanites who raised me. By the end, Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte had been rendered dull lunatics on a series that never successfully justified its own existence. I thought I ended up despising And Just Like That. I now realise it broke my heart.
And Just Like That’s final episode was, to little surprise, abominable. It was by turns moronic and confusing, unfunny and hateful, and seemingly edited with a hacksaw – vague approximations of season-long story arcs were brought to abrupt ends, characters did things that made no sense, and Carrie herself re-learnt a lesson she’d already learnt years ago. She chose herself, essentially, And Just Like That’s ultimate theme being – I guess? – that it’s completely fine for a woman to exist without a man. It’s as if Charlotte’s gorgeous epiphany from Sex and the City season four (“Maybe we can be each other’s soulmates? And then we could just let men be these great, nice guys to have fun with?”) never happened. Which it probably didn’t – for these are pod people wearing the skins of women who used to be brilliant, and regurgitating ideas that were already played out 25 years ago.
I am not an And Just Like That viewer who believed the show had any real flashes of its old flame along the way, or was “finding its feet” just as it was cancelled. Beyond a handful of scenes – most of which took place in the first and, in hindsight, best season of the series – the show completely avoided any of the interpersonal conflict that fuels great drama, and divorced itself from any of the humour and style that made Sex and the City so zippy and bright. I also don’t believe the show achieved an impressive, practically avant-garde ineptitude, either. And Just Like That was just bad – badly acted, badly written and badly shot. And for a series with a high budget and total creative autonomy on a major US streaming platform, this is embarrassing, frankly.
Never was this clearer than in the show’s third and final season. The removal of two key cast members (Sara Ramirez’s disastrous stand-up comic Che Diaz and Karen Pittman’s depressingly underused Nya Wallace) looked set to clear the decks a little and streamline an over-plotted series. But it only exposed the fact that this was never a too-many-characters problem. It wasn’t even a Che Diaz problem (who’d ever have seen that one coming?). What we had here was a show that never figured out why it existed, or who these characters were in their respective sixth decades, and which straddled awkwardly between past and present: fiercely dependent on nostalgia and characters introduced in Sex and the City, but also confused and frightened by anything contemporary. From within that mess, too, came the great absence of why we kept coming back to the original series, and why so many of us still turn to it in hours of need: funny, compelling friends who talk, share, compare and fight, who love and adore each other and mean the world to one another. All gone.
With season three now behind us, a simple question: didn’t it all just seem so… pointless? Miranda’s drab relationship with that dog-owning BBC producer? Seema’s job woes? Lily’s polyamorous boyfriend? John Corbett’s Aidan – an unpretentious lunk carried over from the original series and transformed into an emotionally abusive sadsack who masturbates in his pick-up truck – held much of the season hostage. He trapped Carrie in a baffling romantic ultimatum that no one dared question (a five-year pause on their relationship while he dealt with his demonic teenage son Wyatt), and entire episodes were devoted to the strange dynamics of his family. Then, when Carrie finally called time on their union, Aidan simply vanished, barely to be mentioned again. I can’t believe I’m actually asking this, but… what did happen to Wyatt? Were there any ramifications to Aidan and his ex-wife Kathy sleeping together once again? Won’t somebody catch us up with Kathy’s poor, seemingly lovely husband?
Trapped in this static storyline, Carrie became a dazed bore with nothing to do beyond talk to her cat, clack around her massive townhouse in impractical outfits, and read pages from her howler of a historical fiction novel to the pipe-smoking Margaret Thatcher biographer living downstairs. Anyone who saw Sarah Jessica Parker star alongside her husband Matthew Broderick in last year’s London revival of Neil Simon’s very funny Plaza Suite will know she can still do ebullient lightness in her sleep, so why were her performances this season so oddly lethargic? Carrie is fun, funny, expressive and chaotic. Here she was all verklempt confusion and muted line readings. I sometimes wondered if she was even in the same room as her co-stars. Her work was so devoid of energy that it felt as if she was playing off a wall rather than a real human being. Perhaps Parker had simply grown tired of all of this – I wouldn’t exactly blame her.
Of our regular cast, Charlotte got the worst of it, cycling through a litany of one-and-done comedy subplots devoid of logic or jokes. Her “cancelled” dog. Her spiritual guru Zoom call. Her sitcom vertigo. Her husband Harry – a major, beloved character – was diagnosed with prostate cancer at the season’s midpoint, suggesting a dramatic pivot for both characters, but this speedily became background noise. Did Harry even have dialogue in the last run of episodes that didn’t involve him pining after his lost erection?
Even more than in previous seasons, I could never figure out who And Just Like That was intended for. Between Miranda, Charlotte and Harry’s obnoxious children and the rude, vapid, astrology-worshipping, ambisexual Gen-Z caricatures our leads kept encountering, And Just Like That seemed to have a baffling disdain for young people. But it also seemed to despise older people, too, as well as the poor and lower-middle-class: what was with the random potshots at working class voters who didn’t elect Lisa Todd Wexley’s miserable husband for city comptroller? Or Lisa’s outrage that a subordinate would take up an exciting job opportunity rather than spend an eighth year working on her inexplicably long-in-the-works documentary?
And why was so much of season three possessed by an early-Noughties Farrelly Brothers movie? Harry wetting himself. The farting pregnant woman. The masturbating puppet man. The shots of faeces flying out of Miranda’s toilet in the finale. (Sadly, I wish I was making this last one up.) Just endlessly repulsive scattalogical humour wildly out of step with anything Sex and the City once represented. That said, what didn’t here feel out of step with the Sex and the City of old?
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There was a version of And Just Like That that could have worked, but it didn’t make it to the screen. It arrived, surprisingly, in the form of an article published by The Cut in June, and written by Candace Bushnell, whose newspaper columns originally inspired the series. In it, Bushnell writes about being single and independently wealthy at 66 and still dating – not out of necessity, but because it’s fun. The piece is dishy, sexy, emotional and at times unexpectedly profound, full of evocative characters and subplots. In other words: the complete opposite of And Just Like That, which painted sixtysomething life as grey, manic and depressing, and reduced Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte to gibbering nightmares.
I’ve clung to that Bushnell piece for the past few months, both because it’s wonderfully written but also because it provides a degree of hope. For many people who came to Sex and the City in their younger years – particularly those with dreams of big cities and careers in writing – Carrie Bradshaw represented a vision of what adulthood could be, with its frailties, glamour and setbacks. She was imperfect, narcissistic, prone to very silly behaviour. But also smart, compassionate and incredibly cool: just think of her tip-toeing across her aspirational East Village apartment, typing away a nugget of overwritten wisdom, cigarette in hand. So how bleak to see her now, so devoid of warmth, wisdom or joy…
Thank god, then, for Bushnell, whose writing reminds us that curiosity, humour and emotional intelligence are actually eternal, and not things that dry up once you hit middle-age. And farewell Carrie Bradshaw. You, your friends and those of us who loved all of you deserved better.
