Tea and Infamy Thoughts on And Just Like That

By Elizabeth Kerri Mahon

Last week, HBO Max aired the final episode of And Just Like That, and fans are both relieved that this misbegotten sequel/reboot is over and sad about what the show could have been if the writers had taken their heads out of their asses. I know that’s kind of mean of me, but that’s kind of how I’ve felt watching the show for the past three years. The show went out with a fizzle instead of a bang. When the announcement came that the show was ending, I don’t think a single person believed that Michael Patrick King and Sarah Jessica Parker were the ones to pull the plug. The ratings for the show had consistently gone down from the first season to the third. It’s no wonder that HBO Max decided to cut their losses with this show.

I had no plans to write about the series finale, but my friends and I had a long discussion about the show at brunch two weeks ago (How Sex and the City of us!), and another friend also asked me what I thought! I was shocked by how many thoughts I had, not only about the show in general, but also about Sex and the City. I wrote pages and pages of notes. I’ll try to condense them because otherwise you’ll be here all day reading.

I think it’s hard to realize just what an impact Sex and the City made when it first premiered in 1998. There were no streaming services at the time, just HBO and Showtime, along with a few other cable channels. There wasn’t the wealth of programming that there is today. A lot of it was either British period dramas, reality TV shows, or music channels. Sex and the City was something different. It was effervescent and fun, like a glass of champagne or a cosmopolitan. The viewer felt like they were eavesdropping on these four women as they openly and frankly discussed their dating and sex lives. People were shocked by some of the things the women discussed.

This was before social media; there was no Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, where people could post live about their thoughts, and the Internet was still in its infancy in 1998. People had viewing parties to watch Sex and the City! People couldn’t wait to talk about that week’s episode with their friends. If you missed the episode on Sunday, you had to figure out when HBO might repeat it to catch up. The show was also a love letter to New York City; it made the city seem glamorous and fabulous, rather than crime-ridden and dirty. Women moved to New York because of Sex and the City, hoping to catch a little of that magic. And the fashion! People tuned in just as much for the fashion as for the plot. Manolo Blahnik, Jimmy Choo, and the Birkin bag suddenly became household words.

Miranda, Charlotte, Samantha, and Carrie, women everywhere debated which one of these women they were like (I’ve always thought I was a Charlotte/Carrie hybrid with the sarcasm of a Miranda). The show spawned two movies, a popular bus tour, and Candace Bushnell, the author of the original book, wrote two YA novels about Carrie Bradshaw, which in turn inspired two seasons of The Carrie Diaries on the CW. People to this day still make pilgrimages to the house in Greenwich Village that was a stand-in for Carrie’s apartment on the Upper West Side. And how many of us drank cosmopolitan by the gallon during the late 90s/early aughts?

Which brings me back to And Just Like That. Frankly, I was surprised when this show was announced. The second movie was horrific, and Kim Cattrall had announced that she was done with playing Samantha Jones for many reasons¹. After watching all three seasons, I have to wonder, who was this series for exactly? Because it didn’t feel like it was for the fans of the original show. The original series was not perfect, with the singular lack of non-white characters, and I was amazed when I rewatched the series by how often Miranda, Charlotte, and Carrie slut-shamed Samantha, a woman who was supposed to be their friend.

Fans of Sex and the City asked ‘How could that have turned into this?” while hate-watching And Just Like That. How did a show that many of us look back on with fondness and nostalgia morph into the ultimate hate watch? How did the characters become so unrecognizable? The show began by explaining that Samantha had moved to London and was upset because Carrie had let her go as her publicist due to the pandemic. This made absolutely no sense. Samantha was too good a businesswoman to hold a grudge like that. And then Carrie’s husband, John, aka Big, died after riding his Peloton bike. I had no problem with the show killing off Big. I hated the character; he treated Carrie like crap for most of Sex and the City before finally realizing in the series finale that he wanted to be with her. And Carrie was a doormat during most of that relationship.

While Sex and the City was a tight thirty minutes, And Just Like That was a bloated sixty. The show seemed to struggle with the fact that these women were older, had children, and had obligations. The plotlines seemed disconnected from the modern world. I think the Atlantic said it best when it noted that humiliation, more than anything else, has been the theme of all three seasons, that the show was a cringe comedy without the comedy. The show seemed to rely a little too much on slapstick, particularly this season. Charlotte having vertigo, Harry wetting himself because he couldn’t get his tight pants off, Seema having BO because she used a natural deodorant, and the poop explosion in the finale.

The women couldn’t hang out like they used to, meaning that the dynamic of the four women getting together and discussing the week's theme was gone. I enjoyed Charlotte going back to work, but it felt a little too easy. She met an art dealer at a dinner at Lisa Todd-Wexley’s house, and the next thing you knew, she had a job at an art gallery. No pounding the pavement, sending out resumes, or having multiple job interviews, or any commentary about how hard it is to get a job when you’ve been out of the workforce for twenty years and you’re pushing sixty. Charlotte’s biggest problem was keeping up with the socializing that her twenty-somethings did after-hours, which apparently was where all the big deals went down.

I had no problem with Miranda exploring her sexuality after years of dating men. In fact, in Sex and the City, there was an episode in the first season where a partner at her law firm assumed that she was gay and set her up with a woman. And Miranda admitted that as a child, she had kissed a girl a couple of times, so it didn’t come out of nowhere. I wish the show had treated her relationship with Steve more respectfully. Miranda was the one who pursued him again, despite Steve being in a relationship with another woman. And Miranda’s coming out raises another issue with this show. One is either straight or gay; the ladies and the writers refuse to believe that bisexuality exists. And when Charlotte’s daughter, Lily, starts dating a ballet dancer who is in a polyamorous relationship, the show refuses to examine what that means. They shrug it off as something millennials do.

Despite its frothiness, Sex and the City wasn’t afraid to go deep, Samantha’s cancer, Charlotte’s marriage, divorce, and conversion to Judaism, Miranda choosing to be a single mother, and taking care of Steve’s elderly mother, who had dementia. But on And Just Like That, serious subjects were either brushed aside or played for laughs. Miranda’s drinking problem was solved pretty quickly, and Harry worried more about whether he could get an erection when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. The show missed an opportunity to have Harry and Steve talk man-to-man, given that Steve was also a cancer survivor².

One of the complaints about Sex and the City was that it was too white. And Just Like That tried to correct that by including three women of color and one non-binary character of color, with diminishing results. The less said about the character of Che, the better. The character was awful and mean to Miranda. Seema (Sarita Choudhury) was clearly supposed to be a Samantha substitute. Single woman of a certain age who doesn’t want to get married or have kids but has a healthy sex life. Like Samantha, Seema has a high-powered job as a real estate agent. The show wrote of Che and Miranda’s professor, Naya, after the second season, leaving only Seema and Charlotte’s friend, Lisa Todd-Wexley (Nicole Ari-Parker), and her delightful family as the only major characters of color on the show.

The show missed an opportunity for LTW and Seema to bond, as they are the only two women of color in the friend circle. Imagine if they had tried to hide their budding friendship from Carrie and Charlotte, or if Charlotte or Carrie had accidentally seen some texts from their WhatsApp group, joking about the other women? The show seemed to struggle with what to do with these two women. Seema, whose name was on the door at the real estate firm, for some reason couldn’t get a business loan, but then she could get one, but we never really got a sense of what she planned to do with her own real estate firm. And LTW’s documentary was nothing new or visionary.

I may be in the minority, but I sincerely doubt that anyone out there wanted more of Mario Cantone’s Anthony. He was an annoying minor character on Sex and the City. I didn’t care about his bakery or his relationship with Guiseppe. I hated to see Patti LuPone wasted on this storyline. The time spent on him could have been used to flesh out Seema and Lisa Todd-Wexley.

Let’s talk about Carrie and Aiden for a second. Look, I liked Aiden a lot on Sex and the City, but I never believed that he was endgame for Carrie. They were two different to work long-term. I think Carrie liked Aiden because he was willing to commit to her, unlike Big. I suppose you could say that he was her other great love besides Big, but when the show brought him back, they threw so many obstacles in their path that the audience had to know that this wasn’t going to work out any better than it did the first time around. The minute he refused to set foot inside her old apartment because of the memories, she should have shown him the door. For crying out loud, he married another woman and had three kids in the intervening twenty-something years. It’s not like he walked the earth pining for Carrie all this time. Carrie bent over backwards to accommodate him, even after he slept with his ex-wife, but he still didn’t trust her. Give me an effing break.

Which brings me to Carrie Bradshaw. Big’s death left Carrie a wealthy widow with enough money to travel the world. She could have written her own version of Eat, Pray, Love for the AARP set. She had a podcast that quickly fizzled, but she seemed to lack ambition. Her writing career has always been a mystery to me. She doesn’t appear to have an agent, despite her seven best-selling books, nor does she seem to have any online presence. She doesn't have a website, and she doesn’t tweet, have a Substack, or use Instagram. Apart from the first movie, she doesn’t even have an assistant. We only know that she’s supposed to be a well-known author when someone occasionally mentions it. Her editor suggests that she write a romance, and Carrie immediately sits down and starts writing a terrible historical fiction novel about ‘The Woman,’ without once doing any research. If the show had gotten a fourth season, I would have loved them to bring back Berger³ to review her book for The New Yorker or to interview her at the 92nd Street Y. Now, that would have been hilarious!

The show had the opportunity for Carrie’s writing to be timely. Imagine if she had decided to write a nonfiction book titled 'Menopause and the City'? Her editor and publicist might have worried that Carrie was ruining her brand. Carrie could have complained that readers still want her to be the thirty-something Carrie who went out all the time. The ladies question whether Carrie really wants to be the face of menopause. Carrie could have explored new treatments for menopause, delving deeply into the wellness industry.

I’m okay with Carrie deciding that she’s OK on her own. However, the show finally gave her a decent love interest in Duncan Reeves, the handsome biographer who conveniently moved into the apartment below hers. Apart from his thinking that all her prose was fantastic, and her demeaning comments about how it must be easy for him to write biographies, I thought the two were well-matched. I didn’t buy his decision that he would never return to New York to write.

And Just Like That, this post is done!

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Elizabeth Kerri Mahon is a native New Yorker, actress, and history geek. Pretty Evil New York: True Stories of Mobster Molls, Violent Vixens, and Murderous Matriarchs (Globe Pequot Press), her first foray into historical true crime came out in October 2021.

You can find her and more of her writing on substack at the link provided: Elizabeth Kerri Mahon | Substack