Goodbye to All That

The Atlantic

a day ago

Carrie Bradshaw's last episode of television ended not with a bang but with a flush, which feels appropriate somehow. 'Party of One,' the series finale of HBO Max's And Just Like That, rehashes old patterns for the show's last hurrah, but no one's heart seems to really be in it: Miranda tries to adjust to an unexpected pregnancy; Seema wonders if she could be happily partnered without marriage; Charlotte tells Carrie, 'I'm so excited to show you my new hallway,' to which Carrie replies, pro forma, 'I may be alone for the rest of my life.' The image left in my head, though, is of the toilet bowl being frantically flushed by Charlotte's art-dealer boss, a man whose private jet can't spare him from the gastrointestinal Thanksgiving issues of a lactose-intolerant Gen Zer. Humiliation, more than anything else, has been the theme of all three seasons of And Just Like That, a cringe comedy without comedy. (Who among us will ever forget Carrie peeing into a plastic bottle while Miranda got to third base with Che in her kitchen, or Charlotte taking a pratfall onto a Tracey Emin–esque art installation and emerging with a used condom stuck to her face?)
To be fair to the series, which is more than it deserves, Sex and the City was also often about mortification—the indignity of putting yourself out there as a single woman time and time again, only to be rewarded with funky spunk, porn-addicted dates, pregnancy scares, STDs, men who can't ejaculate without shouting misogynist slurs, envelopes full of cash on the nightstand. When it debuted on HBO in 1998, Darren Star and Michael Patrick King's show seemed determined to puncture the fantasy of single life in post-feminist Manhattan. 'Welcome to the age of un-innocence,' Sarah Jessica Parker's Carrie narrated in the pilot. 'No one has breakfast at Tiffany's, and no one has affairs to remember. Instead we have breakfast at 7 a.m. and affairs we try to forget as quickly as possible.'
Over the course of six seasons and two movies, the show's thrillingly cynical core got smothered by cloying commercialism—a fixation on both wide-eyed romance and flamboyant luxury. What stayed consistent, though, was the disgust the show seemed to manifest anytime it was forced to think about the corporeal bodies beneath the characters' clothes: Carrie's horror at Miranda's postpartum nipples and Samantha's disgust at her unwaxed bikini line, Charlotte's refusal to look at her own vagina, Anthony's appalled proclamation—when Samantha returned from Los Angeles approximately three pounds heavier—of 'Mother of God, what's with the gut!'
And Just Like That has been a lot of things since its debut late in 2021: an apologia for the sins of the past, a lookbook, a backdrop for cameos from the two most Machiavellian men on reality television. But it's consistently been oddly squeamish about both sex and human physicality—almost pathologically so. During the first season, critics winced at the heavy-handed flagellation of the characters for their unconscious bias and uptight middle age; during the second, the show's lack of purpose and stakes crystallized into excruciating storylines about strap-on sex toys and, in one case, an unsolicited octogenarian dick pic that rudely interrupted a fundraiser with Gloria Steinem. The third season, set in the more genteel location of Carrie's new Gramercy Park townhouse, seemed nevertheless stuck on the idea that anyone still tuning in must be watching with the sound off, cackling at the visuals of their favorite characters being ritualistically shamed for the crime of aging.
And so: We had not one but two stories about Harry's penis—first a brief examination of something called 'ghost sperm' that troubled Charlotte during sex, followed by a multi-episode storyline about prostate cancer that left Harry impotent and peeing all over his raw-denim jeans. Seema's armpits occupied a variety of scenes, culminating in the gardener she began dating recommending a crystal deodorant that failed her during a crucial business meeting. Charlotte's sudden struggle with vertigo left her staggering all over Manhattan like a toddler on a boat. Miranda, cursed on this show like no one else, had sex with someone who turned out to be a virgin nun, accidentally flashed Carrie, became a meme after a disastrous appearance on live television, and eventually found love with a woman who's strikingly weird about her dogs, even for a Brit.
And Just Like That, as Jake Nevins wrote in July, 'feels, at times, openly hostile to its own source material and even to the characters themselves.' The pie shoved in Anthony's face by his lover, Giuseppe, felt like a neat distillation of how crudely the series seemed to clown its characters, week after week after week. Earlier this year, I wrote about television's current obsession with extreme wealth, and how shows such as And Just Like That suffer from the diminished stakes that come with easy abundance. When you're insulated from calamity, maybe, the worst thing that can happen is physical degradation—a reminder that no matter how big your closet, how exclusive your couture, we all share the same basic bodily functions, which can fail and shame us in all the same discomfiting ways. Still, the casual cruelty with which And Just Like That treated its cast's bodies as punch lines and visual gags seemed to suggest a deeper unease with what it means to age—to be undeniably, messily human.
The show occasionally expressed the same kind of disgust toward poverty, or toward any evidence of how rising inequality in New York has left many people to live. In the finale, Carrie visits her old apartment, now occupied by a jewelry designer named Lisette, and is horrified to see that Lisette has divided the studio into two claustrophobic spaces with a temporary wall, presumably because she can't afford roughly 600 square feet on the Upper East Side all by herself. The moment reminded me of a plotline in Season 2, in which Miranda went home with a voice actor who was her dream date, only to be repelled by the woman's cramped space: the cat-litter tray, the unmade bed.
No one wants their fantasies to be punctured so abruptly, and yet both scenes demonstrate how out of touch these characters have become, and how hard it is for us to empathize with them in turn. Anthropological curiosity used to define Carrie's work as a columnist; now, in her 50s, she's happier behind the walls of an inward-facing fantasy land, posing for no one in her pre–Gilded Age living room, and turning her romantic misadventures into a god-awfully mawkish historical novel. It's not the ending I would have chosen, but it sure does make it easier to say goodbye.