The real reasons why And Just Like That failed to live up to Sex and the City
Twirling in high heels and a sparkly pink ballgown, singing along to Barry White's You're The First, The Last, My Everything, Carrie Bradshaw danced out of our lives forever in the show's final ever episode, which aired in the US last night.
And Just Like That – the sequel series to Sex and The City – had only clocked up three seasons (half of its predecessor) but a few weeks ago, amid reported falling ratings, showrunner Michael Patrick King announced out of the blue on the show's Instagram account that the series would be the final ever. "It became clear to me that this might be a wonderful place to stop," he explained, adding: "the ongoing storytelling of the Sex and the City universe is coming to an end". Sarah Jessica Parker – who has played the writer-cum-hopeless-romantic since 1998 – wrote a long tribute post on her own social media account: "Carrie Bradshaw has dominated my professional heartbeat for 27 years. I think I have loved her most of all".
HBO Max The final ever And Just Like That episode ended with Carrie, alone but contented, dancing by herself in a pink ballgown (Credit: HBO Max)
The idea of a SATC sequel was met with feverish excitement when it was officially announced back in January 2021. How amazing would it be to catch up with the four, much-loved old friends – Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Charlotte (Kristin Davis), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) and Samantha (Kim Cattrall) – and revisit their lives as 50-somethings? However the show stalled at the first hurdle when it was revealed one of the original four women, Cattrall's man-eating PR queen, would not take part. In the second season of the show, Cattrall threw fans some crumbs with a 70-second cameo, but filmed her scene without any of the other cast members.
How it failed its characters
As for the other women? When the show premiered in 2021, there was widespread disappointment at the way these confident, strong friends had become unrecognisable; and if they were older, they certainly weren't wiser. Miranda, the straight-talking, highly intelligent lawyer was a bumbling wreck, forever blurting out the wrong thing and/or tripping up and falling over. Charlotte was a maniacally cartoonish Upper East Side mother, who also fell over lots (due, it turns out, to her sudden-onset vertigo, never mentioned before season three). And strangely Carrie, as a former sex columnist, could barely even utter the word on her short-lived podcast, having appeared to become more prudish over the intervening years. She also became even more narcissistic, and even more delusional in her romantic choices, after her great love Big (Chris Noth) died on a Peloton bike in the first episode of the reboot. King and his writers had done our girls a great disservice, was the general consensus.
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