‘And Just Like That' Still Has More Stories To Tell, According To Two Of The Show's Writers

Forbes

13 hours ago

Julie Rottenberg and Elisa Zuritsky are the only writing partners that have written for both Sex and the City and its sequel series, And Just Like That…; they also set themselves apart as the only writers at all—other than director, writer and executive producer Michael Patrick King—to make the leap from the original show to the latest.
Rottenberg and Zuritsky—working together for decades now—are so deeply in tune with one another that they finish one another's sentences. When Rottenberg can't quite come up with the right turn of phrase, Zuritsky swoops in. 'See why she's my writing partner?' Rottenberg asks me as I talk to both women over Zoom.
Rottenberg and Zuritsky joined the writers' room of Sex and the City—which ran from 1998 to 2004—in the fourth season; the first episode they wrote aired on July 15, 2001 (and was called 'My Motherboard, My Self'). They wrote one more episode for season four ('Change of a Dress'), one episode for season five ('Luck Be an Old Lady') and three for season six, the show's final season ('Pick-A-Little, Talk-A-Little,' 'The Domino Effect' and 'The Ick Factor').
'By the time we joined [the writers' room of Sex and the City], that show was really a well-oiled machine,' Rottenberg says. 'They had sort of figured out the kinks in the beginning—remember she was talking to the camera, they did testimonials, man on the street? They did the hardest part of building a new show, figuring out what it wanted to be. And so, by the time we joined, it knew exactly what it was.'
Back in the Sex and the City days—which has carried forward into the And Just Like That… days—the material in the writers' room was mined from 'plumbing our own lives for story material,' Zuritsky says, telling me that King, 'more than any other job I've ever had, as a showrunner really believes that the best stories come from people's lives.' When it came to story material for Sex and the City—specifically the four lead female characters' rough experiences with the opposite sex—'we both had a lot to throw on the table,' Zuritsky continues of herself and Rottenberg. 'I was single then, my entire tenure on Sex and the City. I was dating mostly unsuccessfully. My gosh, it was almost as if I had a target on my back.' While her personal life had 'never been worse' in those years, it made for great writing—some of which ended up on the show.
'It was like karma or the universe or God just said, 'You need disastrous experiences to work on this show,'' Zuritsky says. 'So I was gifted a lot of material back then.'
Zuritsky, interestingly, met her husband in the last weeks of working on Sex and the City—when the need for horrible dating stories had ended. 'The curse lifted,' Zuritsky laughs.
Unlike with Sex and the City, Rottenberg and Zuritsky were there from day one with And Just Like That…, which premiered in 2021 and is in the midst of its third season. For season one, the duo wrote four of the season's episodes (two of them alongside King); for the second season, they wrote two episodes and Rottenberg directed one; and for the current third season, they've written two episodes and Rottenberg additionally directed two episodes. The two are roughly the same age as the show's main characters, so now, through And Just Like That…, they get to see their life experiences mirrored on screen again.
'The emotional truth of just about every story we do comes from someone's experience,' Rottenberg says. 'We build on that.'
Though it has three of the four main characters—Samantha Jones, played by Kim Cattrall, is not a key player in And Just Like That… like she was in Sex and the City—it would be a mistake to compare the two shows to one another. 'We know what the old show was,' Rottenberg says. 'We know what worked about that. We know what we loved about that. Now we have the chance to do something new. We knew we couldn't recreate what they created so brilliantly on Sex and the City—so we had to figure out what it wanted to be.'
After a bumpy start as far as reviews go for season one, by season three, as TIME's TV critic Judy Berman put it on May 28, And Just Like That… has become 'its own gloriously preposterous thing.' The sequel series will likely never reach its predecessor at its peak—at the end of its six-season run, the series finale of Sex and the City in February 2004 drew 10.6 million total viewers, according to Nielsen, making it HBO's second-most-watched show (falling only to The Sopranos). For comparison's sake—though that's a slippery slope—the season three premiere of And Just Like That… averaged 429,000 households during the live-plus-three-day viewership window, Forbes reported on June 11. That said, And Just Like That… seems to have finally found its groove as it inches closer to the end of its third season. Berman wrote that the new show 'finally feels less like an SATC hangover and more like its own preposterous yet generally fun thing.' Harper's Bazaar proclaimed on May 30 that 'In season three, Carrie and friends find their stride' below the headline, 'Is And Just Like That… Actually Good Now?'
'From the start, another challenge faced by AJLT is that it has been haunted by the ghost of SATC,' Louis Staples wrote for the outlet, adding that 'The show has finally gone from being so-bad-it's-good to—dare I say it?—genuinely, actually good.'
Rottenberg and Zuritsky—along with the rest of the And Just Like That… writers—had to figure out what could work here, now that the characters were 20 years older. 'That was both exciting and daunting,' Rottenberg says. 'Let's face it—the world was figuring out how to watch this new show that wasn't the old show, but had a lot of the same ingredients. And that's also been fascinating to be a part of. There was no social media back in Sex and the City, so people were angry—and believe me, people were angry and had strong feelings—but it didn't have the, shall we say, microphone that social media allows for now.'
When I press what it would have been like if there had been, say, X or TikTok during the run of the first show, Rottenberg admits, 'It's a fascinating thought.' Rather than post on social media, she says, back in the day they wrote letters. 'We still get in equal parts rage and thank you notes,' Rottenberg says.
Rottenberg and Zuritsky say that they're still turning to embarrassments in their lives for storylines, as well as difficult patches in their life; the character of Charlotte York Goldenblatt—played by Kristin Davis—and her fertility issues were largely inspired by both Rottenberg and Zuritsky's own fertility issues. 'I keep a running list in my phone of things that happen to me,' Zuritsky says.
In the 17 years between the two shows, Rottenberg and Zuritsky would frequently look at each other and say 'God, I wish we were doing this show now, because we have all these new things to add to it,' Zuritsky says. 'And so to be able for the show to catch up with us and for us to be able to jump on the bus again and kind of put all of our raising teens stories and feelings into the characters, it's been really an honor and a thrill to be able to contribute in that way to these characters' lives.'
Like Rottenberg and Zuritsky are friends, the characters of Charlotte, Carrie Bradshaw and Miranda Hobbes are, from talking to the women, like longstanding friends of theirs as well, in their own way. And Just Like That… has seen Rottenberg take on the challenge of directing after years of being, as Rottenberg put it, 'a closeted director.'
'I wish I hadn't waited 20 years to raise my hand,' she says, pointing to Zuritsky's urging and nudging over the years as a reason why she finally took the leap.
'So if I have any message to the younger generation of, especially women, I would say don't wait to try the thing that you might be too afraid to do because the best way to learn is by doing it,' she adds. 'And I was really terrified. And I think definitely, if I hadn't had Elisa pushing me, I would've remained a closeted director the rest of my career.'
Just like women in their 50s continue to have stories to tell, so do the characters of And Just Like That…, partially told through the collective pen of Rottenberg and Zuritsky. I spoke to the two women ahead of the surprising August 1 announcement from King that And Just Like That… would be ending after season three, writing in a statement shared to Instagram that the show 'is coming to an end,' adding that while he was writing the last episode of the third season, 'it became clear to me that this might be a wonderful place to stop.'
To hear Rottenberg tell it weeks before this announcement, they're nowhere near done yet. 'The truth is, there is still a lot to be mined from women in our 50s who are still—even if it looks like the shop is all set up and we have partners and kids and in-laws and jobs, that there is an endless amount of pain and shame and growth to be had,' she tells me. 'It kind of blows me away that I'm at this age and I'm still learning things about myself and about myself in a relationship.'
'We're still learning how to get along in this world,' Rottenberg continues. 'The challenges of being a human are still there. So I think it's more of those sticky, embarrassing, shameful, thrilling psychological mazes that we go through that I'm excited to keep writing about.'
King added that he and Parker 'held off announcing the news until now because we didn't want the word 'final' to overshadow the fun of watching the season. It's with great gratitude we thank all the viewers who have let these characters into their homes and their hearts over these many years.'
It seems unbelievable to think that, once again, we won't have Carrie Bradshaw on our television screens—but the work of Rottenberg and Zuritsky, up until the very end of the Sex and the City universe, remains relevant, a tale spanning decades of women in New York City told in part by two women who grew as close to these beloved characters as anybody.