I loved Sex and the City, but I'm glad its silly spin-off is finally over

Telegraph

5 days ago

And just like that… it's over. The Sex and the City universe, created in 1998 by Darren Star, and continued by Michael Patrick King via two films and the spin-off series And Just Like That (AJLT), is no more. It ended not with a declaration of love with Duncan in London, nor a return to Carrie's original apartment, but with a karaoke machine and a raw turkey. At least there was a Molly Goddard tutu.
Big is dead. Aidan is gone (again). And it's clear from the title of the final episode, Party of One, that this is going one way for Carrie Bradshaw, who opens the episode confronting her newfound singledom in the worst place humanly possible for it: a hot pot restaurant.
I have to give credit to showrunner King – there were flashes of the Sex and the City of yore. 'I have to quit thinking 'maybe a man' and start thinking 'maybe just me',' Carrie says to Charlotte, on a classic SATC sidewalk stroll, when she admits that she's never really anticipated being alone. You can almost imagine a cut to her old MacBook screen, by the window, Marlboro Light in hand.
Charlotte's reply: 'You are so fabulous,' which mirrors the last line of the original Sex and the City finale. Carrie also declares she wants her garden to be 'more wild and free', referencing season three's Ex and the City, one of the best episodes the franchise ever produced. The Easter eggs are in abundance.
While the group watches a bridal fashion show (why are they there? Unclear), Seema is stewing over learning that boyfriend Adam thinks weddings are a waste of time. Carrie asks: 'Do you have to get married?', to which Seema responds: 'I don't know. Do I? Or do I just think I have to?'
At its best, the original Sex and the City could distil the experiences of young women into a single scene, pulled together with Carrie's snappy narration, the observations for her newspaper column. Seema's declaration – 'I feel him more than I've felt any other man' – also echoes Samantha Jones and Smith Jerrod in the original finale, a nice bit of symmetry for the character who was often thought of as the Kim Cattrall replacement.
Miranda and Steve are on the nostalgia train too, in a similar place to where they were at the end of SATC, still facing what life throws at them, together (though still divorced), as co-parents (and co-grandparents). And as Carrie strolls up to Thanksgiving at Miranda's apartment in the maroon tutu, referencing core SATC lore, I couldn't help but wonder… were they about to pull this off?
Alas, no, because this is AJLT, so we must be subjected to a last-ditch attempt at wokery via new characters we don't care about (in the form of Mia, mother of Brady's unborn baby, and her two friends, Epcot and Silvio, the latter of whom vogues around the apartment and is unrealistically rude). Even a cameo from Che Diaz in the emergency vet scene would have been better.
It descends into stupidity. Carrie 'I use my oven for storage' Bradshaw is left to tend to the turkey. Then there's an overflowing toilet, which (thankfully) puts an end to the weird flirting Mark Kasabian, Charlotte's art dealer friend, is attempting with Carrie. That Miranda Hobbes's final scenes feature her scrubbing excrement off her bathroom floor is an apt end for a character who has been reduced to the bumbling, meme-able butt of the joke.
Charlotte, given little screen time this episode, is happily navigating life with Harry after cancer, and her story arc is back where it was at the end of SATC, focused on what's next for her family. She's largely been a caricature of her former self in AJLT, but I did see flashes of old Charlotte, who was always the heart of the original show, when she was grappling with feelings of gender grief towards her non-binary child Rock.
Lisa Todd Wexley (unfortunately) doesn't have the much-teased affair, but could have Michelle Obama narrate her documentary. You win some, you lose some.
The final segment is much like the one which ties up the original finale, albeit this time it's to the karaoke version of Barry White's You're The First, The Last, My Everything, and the narrative thread is… Thanksgiving pie. I felt completely indifferent as the credits rolled.
And yet, I chose to stay. I hung on, when many others didn't – 1.1million households tuned into the pilot of AJLT, compared to 429,000 for the first episode of the last season, while 10.6million watched the finale of the original series in 2004 in the US and 4.1million in the UK. Like many fans, I got hooked on Sex and the City as a 15-year-old, watching in secret – my mum was a fan but I wasn't allowed – and learning about cosmopolitan dating and fashion. I've grown up with it and have the battered boxset to prove it.
Admittedly, I also stayed ' hate-watching ' it for Every Outfit, the pop culture podcast hosted by Chelsea Fairless and Lauren Garroni (who started it originally as an Instagram account that dissected every single outfit from the show), which analyses and lovingly tears down each AJLT episode with dry wit (and a lot of respect for the original). I contacted them the moment I finished the finale.
'It led me to contemplate if Carrie Bradshaw had passed away during her season one hip replacement surgery,' Fairless tells me, 'because the rest of the series feels like a Jacob's Ladder-esque hallucination.' It's a fair statement for a show that has lacked narrative cohesion and is littered with plot holes – the worst one being when the writers forgot that they killed off Lisa's father in season one, before killing him again in season three. Let's not even revisit how they wrote Stanford out of the show. Sometimes I wondered if the writers were trying to test us.
Did it have to end like this? Not according to Fairless. 'Both the season one and season two finales felt more final to me. I could never have imagined that they would end this series with Carrie alone in her cavernous Gramercy Park townhouse, listening to a karaoke song with no vocals.'
Carrie ending up on her own may atone for criticisms of how the original show ended, with all four leads coupled up and Carrie now with the man who had treated her appallingly for years. Some thought it was a cop-out for a show that made its name celebrating being free and single – neatly symbolised in A Woman's Right to Shoes (season 6, episode 9), which still has as much resonance today as it did in 2004.
I miss what Sex and the City was. I won't miss what AJLT became. But I thank my Jimmy Choos it's over because, like any toxic relationship, I would have watched another season. Now I have no choice but to go back to season one, episode one.