‘Carrie had nothing to do but wander around in couture': how Sex and the City's characters deserved better

The Guardian

a day ago

After 27 years, some of TV's most beloved characters have left our screens for ever. Throughout Sex and the City, Carrie Bradshaw chronicled her loves, infatuations, affairs, heartbreaks, friendships, high fashion, homes, work and more, all over a cosmopolitan or five. Throughout what would turn out to be the final season of its spin-off, And Just Like That, she finally ended her extremely on/off 20-year-relationship with country boy Aidan, a man revived for the series with a cruel streak and all the subtlety of Elmer Fudd, and slowly bought furniture for her enormous mansion.
In many ways, the entire series was an inglorious swansong. And Just Like That first appeared in 2021, and devotees of the original might have held a tentative flicker of hope that in returning to these beloved characters, now in their 50s, it might find a way to repurpose some of its former magic for this new stage of life. It began with a splash by killing off Carrie's husband, Mr Big, who had a heart attack while overdoing it on his stationary exercise bike.
Some felt that such a casual death was disrespectful to the show's history – something that would become a running theme – but it did, at least, suggest that the show was not going to hold back, or tiptoe around its past and legacy.
Unfortunately, it went in the other direction, careering all over that legacy like a toddler just learning to walk. There would be no Samantha, of course: Kim Cattrall, who played her, has long been open about her poor relationship with her former cast mates and her lack of interest in returning to the show.
And Just Like That tried to plug the Samantha gap with new friends, finding Samantha's ambition in a documentary-maker, Lisa Todd Wexley (Nicole Ari Parker), and her sex drive in real estate agent Seema Patel (Sarita Choudhury), though both mostly felt like superfluous distractions from the core characters.
Cattrall did return as Samantha for 71 seconds, during the season two finale, but only to phone Sarah Jessica Parker's Carrie to let her know that she wouldn't make it to the party, after all. The scene was delicious, camp and regal, but a stark reminder of how much the character was missed.
From its earliest days, And Just Like That became synonymous with hate-watching. This reached its peak with Miranda's divorce from Steve and affair with Che Diaz, a non-binary standup comedian, who turned into one of the internet's favourite least-favourite characters. Che was poorly written, sure, but they were indicative of the show's haphazard handling of ageing. It largely examined getting older by placing characters in a state of bewilderment at how much the world had changed since the early 00s, which felt shallow and unflattering to their intelligence. They would be confused by podcasts, or restaurants with digital menus. The wit and acidic humour of Sex and the City allowed it to ask big questions, not all of which have aged well, but in And Just Like That, there was simply an admission that nobody really knew what was going on any more.
All of its worst tendencies came out in the finale. Oddly, it mostly ended up being about Charlotte's friend Mark, Brady, the mother of Brady's unborn child and her confusingly obnoxious young genderqueer friends (let it go!). It was a shrug of a plotline that washed its hands of everything that made the characters what they once were, by deciding not to make it about the characters at all.
Through much of the last season, there was a sense that Carrie has nothing to do but wander around in couture, aimlessly, too rich to have any ambitions left, other than a now vague notion of romantic love. It is not a tragedy that she waved farewell to the land of Sex and the City as a single woman, but it is not as poignant as the writers seem to believe it is, either. It's nothing-ey, an ambient inbetween, a very And Just Like That-esque, 'will this do?'. After a particularly hideous blocked-toilet episode, Carrie said the punchline that the whole scene was written to deliver: 'Shit happens.' It was a muted note on which to bow out.
They knew the end was coming, that much is clear. At the start of August, in the statement announcing that it would be ending for good, showrunner Michael Patrick King said that when writing the last episode, 'it became clear to me that this might be a wonderful place to stop'.
Wonderful might have been pushing it. It has been a curious four years, full of superfluous nonsense, not unpleasant, but not a patch on its TV ancestor. That blocked toilet, overflowing, was doing some heavy lifting when it came to the metaphor. It is hard to argue that And Just Like That should have gone on, when it became so evident that it had nowhere to go.