And Just Like That gives Carrie Bradshaw a weirdly perfect ending

Vox

3 days ago

is a senior correspondent who explains what society obsesses over, from Marvel and movies to fitness and skin care. He came to Vox in 2014. Prior to that, he worked at The Atlantic.
And just like that, Carrie Bradshaw is single again.
For the last three seasons, fans have watched TV's greatest anti-heroine begin an entire new set of adventures. After HBO original Sex and the City ended in 2004 (followed by the fun 2008 film of the same name and its not-so-fun 2010 sequel), And Just Like That picked up in 2021 with Carrie's happily ever after. The most fabulous woman in Manhattan seemed to have everything she's ever wanted: a loving marriage to her Mr. Big (Chris Noth), a condo on Fifth Avenue, financial security beyond her wildest dreams, and a truly gigantic closet.
But no one is immune to late life's indignities, apparently not even Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker).
In the show's often-clunky style, Carrie faced a series of dismal realities. She became a widow; she hosted a podcast; she left behind her beloved apartment for a beautiful but strangely empty Gramercy Park brownstone. She wasted a bunch of her (and the audience's) time on an ill-fated attempt at rekindling her romance with the country Lurch known as Aidan Shaw (John Corbett). Money remained a non-issue for Carrie, but the show often reminded us that not even immense amounts of wealth could insulate you from life's dishonors.
In the series finale — which showrunner Michael Patrick King abruptly announced at the beginning of August — Carrie finds herself at a place not unlike when we first met her in that pilot episode years ago: single, in heels, living in Manhattan, bolstered by her friends, but wondering if there's love left in the Greatest City on Earth.
It's not the fairytale ending. But Carrie's story ending by herself feels true. Truer, even.
The original show wrapped with true love for all of its heroines, but something felt off. The real point of Sex and the City was always Carrie's relationships with Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), Charlotte (Kristin Davis), and Samantha (the now-absent Kim Cattrall).
While And Just Like That has been criticized for its tone and poor writing (one secondary character was seemingly killed off twice), it managed to give Carrie Bradshaw an ending that captured the daring admission of the original: that being lucky in love is good, but being lucky in friendship is everything.
And Just Like That's surprise Thanksgiving from hell
From urinating on themselves, to getting roasted on stage by their nonbinary comedian ex, to dying on a Peloton, the characters of And Just Like That seemingly exist only to be humiliated.
In King's world, life after 40 is nothing but a gauntlet of perverse embarrassments.
The continued indignities of aging — so imaginatively bleak that death starts to seem like a sweet release — have turned And Just Like That into a show that people resent, criticize, and demand 17 more seasons of. One cannot fathom the horrors Carrie, Charlotte, and Miranda will face each week, usually centered on their bodies betraying them or being left behind by a world that deems them too old. Each new mortification feels shocking, sacrilegious to the show's glamorous predecessor. At the same time, there's kind of a perverse glee in watching how deranged it all can get.
What do you mean Carrie had hip replacement surgery and, in a temporary state of medicated paralysis, was left to listen helplessly as her coworker passionately throttled Miranda's lower half like a rotary phone in the other room? Charlotte battling a bout of vertigo and falling into an art installation with fake ejaculate cannot be real, can it? Miranda had sex with a virgin nun played by Rosie O'Donnell? What is a person supposed to say to that… okay???
Unfortunately for Carrie, she endures one final degradation in the series finale: Miranda's Thanksgiving. In the world of AJLT, a beloved American holiday about remembering the things we're grateful for unfurls into a nightmare.
Everyone but Carrie has bailed on Miranda's get-together, staying with their own husbands and families. Since Carrie possesses neither, she has to witness a trainwreck that includes raw turkey, a clogged toilet and brown fecal water, an Italian greyhound emergency at the vet, the future mother of Miranda's grandchild and her obnoxious friends, and a failed, surprise set-up attempt.
Eating with a giant doll is one of the small humiliations that a single woman like Carrie Bradshaw must endure on And Just Like That. Craig Blankenhorn/HBO Max
There's a heavy-handed point to all this misery.
This gathering is a crystallization of Carrie's future. In this era of her life, Carrie Bradshaw is single, and if she doesn't want to spend Thanksgiving alone, she might have to endure a few lousy ones at the hands of her friends. It all comes around to the bigger question: What if Carrie's future does not include one more love? Is that okay?
'I have to quit thinking maybe a man, and start accepting maybe just me,' she tells Charlotte. 'And it's not a tragedy.'
Having survived a holiday radiating such dark, melancholic energy, Carrie taps out. Going home alone isn't such a hardship, though. She returns to her gorgeous mansion to eat pie in heels. For her, it's heaven. After all, this is the woman who professed to find true joy in tearing open a sleeve of saltines and smearing a sliver of grape jelly on each one, while reading an entire issue of Vogue standing up.
What Carrie has is actually the furthest thing from tragic, rather, something much more thrilling — something that the original show should have considered.
And Just Like That dared to give Carrie and ending that Sex and the City didn't
The most frustrating thing about Sex and the City is how its ending betrayed the show's heart and soul.
For six seasons, the show touted the revolutionary concept that its heroines — Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda, and Samantha — just needed each other. SATC was unafraid to imagine that female friendship could be more powerful, more enduring, and more satisfying than romantic love.
'Don't laugh at me,' Charlotte tells her best friends in season four. 'But maybe we can be each other's soulmates.'
The idea of soulmates has largely been framed as romantic good fortune, the notion that the universe has picked out lives meant to be lived together, if only these hopeful lovers can find one another. SATC offered a more optimistic reimagining, a theory that our best friends are the true matches we should be so lucky to find in this world.
Despite the show's title, sex and love were never really part of the show's fairytale. Men were often terrible, rarely lasting more than an episode. Sex was rarely sexy, more often skewered than celebrated.
It's sort of a shame then, at the end of the series, that these four soulmates all end up married to or are exclusively committed to men nowhere near as magical as they are.
Miranda marries Steve (David Eigenberg), and opens up their home to his mother. Charlotte converts to Judaism, marries Harry (Evan Handler), and they adopt a baby from China. Samantha beats cancer and asks for a monogamous relationship with Smith Jerrod (Jason Lewis). Carrie leaves her callous Russian boyfriend (Mikhail Baryshnikov) for Big, and returns to New York with the man she's been chasing all these years.
Maybe Carrie Bradshaw never needed a man for a happy ending. Craig Blankenhorn/HBO Max
We're meant to see these as happy, fulfilled endings — even though our main characters were all essentially separated from one another. The relationships they nurtured through some of their worst moments — Carrie's heartbreaks, Miranda's mother dying, Samantha's cancer, Charlotte's divorce — were pushed aside to accommodate men. The show told us over and over that these friends could have a fulfilled life with just each other, but it didn't seem to truly believe its own revolutionary message.
As clumsy as AJLT was at times, it had a better sense of what the original show meant.
Carrie finally stumbled upon the realization that her life never needed marriage, romantic love, or maybe even sex, to be fabulously beautiful. Surely, these things don't hurt, but they were never the heart of the matter.
Decades later, but never too late, Carrie finally got the ending she and her friends told us to believe in.