Are you a Carrie, a Miranda, a Samantha or a Charlotte?”
Circa 2002, this question was as ubiquitous as asking someone their star sign – the ultimate shortcut to defining what kind of woman you were (there being only four known “genres” of women at the time). For millennials, the answer said as much about you as your Hogwarts house or whether you preferred Ryan or Seth from The OC (Ravenclaw and Seth, in case you were wondering).
For the uninitiated, the question relates to the four main characters in the era-defining HBO show Sex and the City. It ran for six seasons from 1998 to 2004, spawned two aggressively awful feature films, and has now provided inspiration for the sequel show nobody asked for, And Just Like That…, the third season of which is now out on Sky and Now TV.
When posed the aforementioned personality quiz question, I always believed that there was only one acceptable response: Miranda. Charlotte was too prim and marriage-obsessed, Samantha too much the caricature of a man-eater to be strictly believable (nearly every word of dialogue out of her mouth was a notoriously smutty innuendo), and Carrie… well, the less said about Carrie Bradshaw the better. Two words: insufferable narcissist.
Miranda, by contrast, was our relatable kween, the only character of the quartet even vaguely approaching approachable. Played by a refreshingly normal-looking Cynthia Nixon, she did a proper job and worked long hours, which realistically accounted for her nice wardrobe and ability to afford a Manhattan apartment. She had interests outside of men and dating – she even trained for the marathon, not that we were ever permitted to see her actually running the damn thing – binge-watched crap telly and always got the same order from her local Chinese takeaway. Despite being super high-powered and smart, she made the occasional sex or dating snafu in a way that very much resonated with me as a 20-year-old still figuring out how to talk to the men I fancied instead of studiously ignoring them. Oh, and she called Carrie out on her bulls*** every once in a while, practically a public service in a show with such a frequently irritating lead.
In this latest instalment of And Just Like That… (will AJLT ever catch on?), Miranda once again saves the day. Amid Carrie’s incessant narration about her four-bedroom Gramercy Park townhouse, Charlotte’s family drama, Lisa Todd Wexley’s tedious efforts to make a worthy PBS documentary about black “sheroes”, and Seema Patel’s failure to be the new Samantha despite her very best efforts, Miranda is the one doing all the heavy lifting when it comes to offering anything close to sexy, interesting or fun.
If you didn’t know, Miranda is a lesbian these days, and her ensuing sexcapades as a fiftysomething trawling queer bars after dark – at one point resulting in an excruciating exchange with her grown-up son’s former babysitter – are pretty much the only thing that make the show even remotely watchable.
If there’s one thing Sex and the City always excelled at, it was knowing what was fashionable. The new series of AJLT can’t always say the same – Carrie’s diabolically big hat in episode one is like an insane, gingham tumour growing out of her head – but it does sometimes hit the mark. After all, what could be more in vogue right now than all things ecclesiastical? Thanks to the film Conclave, the real conclave following the death of Pope Francis and the subsequent furore of kitsch excitement and spawning of 1,000 memes surrounding the selection of Pope Leo XIV, organised religion is having a moment in the spotlight. And who is Miranda to buck a trend? In the first episode of AJLT, she ends up unwittingly popping a woman’s cherry, only discovering after the fact that her conquest was a nun. Called Mary. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, she deflowered the virgin Mary; the ensuing jokes practically write themselves. (“Can I ghost a nun?”; “It would be a holy ghost.” Ba-dum-tss!)
Mary, being both new to the sins of the flesh and NYC, won’t stop messaging Miranda, asking her to meet at a flurry of embarrassing tourist spots a native New Yorker wouldn’t be caught dead in, with the climax being the M&M’s store after watching the musical Wicked on Broadway.
“I always knew this person was somewhere inside of me – and now I’ve met her, thanks to you,” Sister Mary tells a bewildered Miranda while standing in Times Square. “‘Because I knew you; because I knew you; I have been changed for good’ – that’s from Wicked.”
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It’s exactly the kind of silly, frothy fun that used to constitute the majority of SATC storylines when the foursome were in their thirties and forties, helpfully breaking up the tedium of Carrie and Mr Big’s endless on-again, off-again drama. In fact, Samantha even tried to seduce a buff Franciscan monk in one notable episode in season four. But it’s what’s been sorely missing from the reboot, which naturally has fewer rich seams of plot to mine; after all, two decades down the line, dating and sexploits have been replaced by marriage, family life and careers. None of which can compare to the risqué charm of the original. For all that it might seem dated now, it was groundbreaking at the time to see a crew of single, sex-positive women experiencing all kinds of kinks and proclivities, often prioritising passion over romantic love.
So yes, thank goodness for Miranda. All these years later, she’s still the only acceptable answer in my eyes.
‘And Just Like That…’ is released on Sky and Now every Friday from 30 May
