And Just Like That, the Sex and the City spinoff finally hits its stride in season 3

Australia Broadcast Center

4 days ago

The much-maligned spin-off to Sex and the City keeps getting better and better. The first season, atrocious. The second season, less so. This season? Almost good, if the first six episodes are anything to go by.
What: The third instalment of Sex and the City's controversial spin-off series.
Created by: Michael Patrick King, Darren Star
Starring: Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon, Kristin Davis, Sarita Choudhury, Nicole Ari Parker, Mario Cantone, John Corbett
When: Streaming now on Max
Like to make you feel: Entertained, but mostly desperate to rewatch Sex and the City
Season 3 picks up right where Season 2 left off. Carrie is trying to stay upbeat while navigating an amorphous long-distance relationship with Aidan, while Seema is unsuccessfully trying to maintain her own with Ravi. Miranda is attempting to break into the lesbian dating scene.
Charlotte continues to juggle her new-found return to the art gallery world with being a mother to the two most demanding, upper-middle-class brats. LTW (Lisa Todd Wexley) exudes an aura of perennial glamour while supposedly spending every waking minute working or tending to her three children and husband. Anthony is happily in love with Giuseppe and establishing a second Hot Fellas store.
Che and Nya? Nowhere to be seen. Audiences were given the head's up that these two characters would be written out, but nowhere does it factor into the narrative.
Che, as annoying as they were, was close enough to be invited to Carrie's farewell soiree for her beloved apartment, while Nya housed Miranda as she got back on her feet post-divorce. The narrowed focus does aid the flow of the series but Nya's absence, in particular, is keenly felt. (Though perhaps I'm glad the creators didn't try to reason these two characters away a la Stanford Blatch's conversion into a monk.)
Arguably, the best part of Sex and the City was that each episode was seamlessly built around a cohesive thread that became a through line for each character's narrative arc. But if the first season of AJLT featured numerous characters flailing around in disparate ways, this third season sees the central action unfolding simultaneously and together.
In the second episode, multiple characters are rendered powerless by their phones in distinct ways, while the third is loosely about the challenges of juggling child-rearing with a career and the pain of business betrayals.
The third episode also resuscitates the most delightful of Sex and the City tropes: one of Carrie's friends tagging along with her on a book-related publicity trip, this time to Virginia.
Sex and the City was always aspirational. Although it has since transpired that Carrie lived in the golden age of writing where one was paid $4.50 (!!) a word, the number of designer shoes she owned spoke of someone sitting on a far bigger honey pot than a weekly column. Charlotte stopped working because she could. Miranda and Samantha were the only ones who held down full-time jobs.
Fast-forward two decades and their lives — with the exception of Miranda, whose decades as a commercial lawyer seems to have done nothing for her bank balance — are even more unattainable, but AJLT's writers are always intent on showcasing that even the landed gentry aren't immune from the inconveniences of regular life.
Carrie resides in an idyllic oasis in the heart of Manhattan, but it doesn't stop a congregation of rats from erupting out of her garden one sunny afternoon. Charlotte and LTW have all the comforts money can buy, but it doesn't stop the tectonic plates of death and loss from touching them in some way or another. Seema even has to forego her chauffeur after falling victim to a coup at work.
Sex and the City had a rotating cavalcade of the most eccentric, zany characters — rich global heiress Amalita, reckless party girl Lexi Featherson, terse fashion show producer Lynn Cameron among them — and in a deft illustration that life continues to expand and diverge in fascinating ways as we age, AJLT expertly models this with the introduction of several memorable side characters. Enter Rosie O'Donnell in a brief cameo as a love interest of Miranda's, Cheri Oteri as a ruthless matchmaker, and Jonathan Cake as Carrie's grouchy new downstairs neighbour.
And then there's the matter of Carrie herself. The trials and tribulations of her relationship with Aidan are delicately handled and traverse an area Sex and the City previously never really has: the nuclear family. We of course see glimpses of this in the lives of Charlotte and, to a lesser extent, Miranda, but in Carrie's tentative introduction into Aidan's life, we witness the challenges of parenting a child with special needs without the patina of wealth and luxury that coats Charlotte's family life. Carrie (surprisingly) takes it in her stride.
But it doesn't change the fact that she's a supremely hard character to be in the head of. It is a truth universally acknowledged that Carrie is a horrible friend, and nowhere is this more apparent than in a startling conversation in the fifth episode, where Miranda sharing an anecdote in solidarity with Carrie elicits a "what does that have to do with me?".
Carrie's friendship mishaps (and there are many) in the original series could be overlooked as a certain immaturity, but a Carrie who has seemingly learned nothing at the age of 55 speaks of a stagnation that's harder to stomach.
And despite how laughably twee Carrie's trademark "I couldn't help but wonder" voiceovers were, the re-introduction of them in the style of the thinly veiled historical fiction she's taken to writing is monumentally worse.
Still. The third season is genuinely funny, resurrects the repartee of deep friendship, and is closer to recreating the magic of Sex and the City than any season of AJLT has been.
The first season's obsessive attempt to be woke as a belated corrective to centring four white women has since settled into a more natural storytelling groove that touches on the Zeitgeist without being subsumed by it. And its self-conscious, overly degenerative portrayal of middle-age has morphed into something teeming with possibilities and adventure.
Besides — despite Samantha's continued absence, which sees her most tawdry qualities distilled into annoying text messages — we have the next best thing: Patti LuPone making an appearance later in the series.