A tell-all book or miniseries examining the monumental screwup of And Just Like That feels inevitable.Craig Blankenhorn/HBO MAX
The nay-sayers had it wrong. We weren’t hate-watching And Just Like That. We were hope-watching it.
Every Thursday for three seasons, we would tune into the HBO/Max series with a ragged, here-we-go inhale, wondering if this was finally the episode where the characters would return to some semblance of the women we best-friended on Sex and the City. So the abrupt announcement that AJLT was ending felt like a gut punch. You took a franchise that meant a lot to us, mangled it, didn’t know how to fix it and so you’re just … out? To paraphrase the last line of Carrie’s dreadful novel, we’re not alone, but the show has certainly left us on our own.
That’s right, we’re emotional. This franchise was our girlfriend, and girlfriends are precious. Or rather, they should have been.
When we first met the SATC quartet in 1998 – newspaper sex columnist Carrie (Parker), attorney Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), gallerina Charlotte (Kristen Davis) and PR queen Samantha (Kim Cattrall, from whose absence AJLT never recovered) – there were watercooler shows on network and cable TV: ER, Friends, Fraser, Dawson’s Creek. But SATC was different. It was about sex, yes, and its urban doyennes were aspirational. But its core mission was revelatory: to show female friends talking. That was the brief. Tight writing, solid acting, top-notch production values, devoted to a show about how women talk to one another.
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Our quartet weren’t kvetching moms, or shrieking Housewives, or lady cops chasing the killers of other ladies. They were – as Charlotte put it in a series-defining sentence – each other’s soulmates, supporting one another to become the smartest, funniest, strongest version of themselves. They were enacting the comedy and drama of female friendship, the animating force of our lives.
We watched it on repeat. We can still cite outfits – the white shaved mink, the bunny-tail skirt – and quote lines: “Is your vagina in the New York City guidebooks?” “Yes, Mrs. Adams, I brought the marijuana into this house – and I’m taking it with me when I go.” “I’m sorry. I can’t. Don’t hate me.” (We can’t quote one single line from AJLT.) We were bemused when SATC ended with all four women paired up with men like cups in their saucers, but we also knew they would always have each other.
Four years after Carrie strutted off (“I strut?”) to Candi Staton singing You’ve Got the Love, we lined up for Sex and the City: The Movie. Uh-oh. Memo to Michael Patrick King: Women do not come to New York for labels and love; we come, as our quartet came, for career, adventure and to find ourselves. The labels and the loves should have been just the sprinkles on the Magnolia Bakery cupcakes; the women’s relationships were the point. How could our actresses sign onto a project that forgot that? It shook us. And then, gah, 2010, the second movie. We tacitly agreed to avert our eyes and never speak its name.
But like Charlie Brown, we were willing to kick at this football no matter how many times Lucy pulled it away. So in December, 2021, there we were, hoping that our (now trio of) friends were finally themselves again. And … it was worse. Why were they acting like they’d been asleep in an underground bunker for 10 years? Our girlfriends were early adopters. They would not have been bewildered by queerness, diversity and technology; they would have kept up. They would have been out in real New York – having rooftop omakase experiences, sporting wearable tech at boutique fitness classes, letting loose in MDMA sessions – not lost in this weird, one-percenters-only Nowheresville. We watched every episode with perplexed dismay, the cartoon bubble above our heads just a ball of scribbles.
In Sex And The City, our protagonists were each other’s soulmates, supporting one another to become the smartest, funniest, strongest version of themselves.Craig Blankenhorn/HBO MAX
Why had these women stopped talking to each other? SATC scripts were taut: Carrie’s column set a theme, the women ventured out around that theme, and then the real show happened: They gathered to discuss what they’d found. Each brought a distinct point of view – Charlotte was romantic, Miranda cynical, Samantha fearless and Carrie curious – and they challenged one another to see it. Within their dialogues, we heard ourselves and found ourselves. We figured out what we think, what we know.
How we would have loved those discussions to now focus on midlife. Because it turns out to be a surprisingly bewildering time. In our 30s, we thought if we just kept plugging, we’d get to where we were headed: a fulfilling career, a comfortable home, maybe a partner and a family. But in our 50s, we discovered no, the waves are always lapping at the shore, the ground is always unstable, we’re losing as much as we’re holding onto. To have heard the original Charlotte, Carrie and Miranda discuss how they were coping with that would have been a balm.
Instead, we got plots and conversations that went nowhere. When Carrie told Miranda that Big – the alleged love of her life – might have been a mistake, that should have been a shattering realization that called for Emergency Cocktails and spilled into more episodes. Yet Bizarro Miranda replied only, “I don’t know what to say.” And they never mentioned it again. Meanwhile, a storyline about deodorant lasted two episodes.
Why was the writing so lazy? Because they knew they had a golden ticket of IP (intellectual property), so they didn’t have to try? Why did Parker play Carrie as if she’d never had a sense of humour? Did Michael Patrick King begin to think he was King Michael Patrick? There has to be more to the story of why this door slammed shut so suddenly; a tell-all book or miniseries examining this monumental screwup is inevitable.
After the announcement of the end, Parker posted a clip reel on Instagram, explaining – or let’s just say it, lying – that she and showrunner King had made the decision because they “recognized this chapter, complete.” Complete? Sure, let’s all eat pie in a season finale, but don’t gaslight us that anything is complete. Not after we’ve spent 27 years hanging out with you precisely because you used to tell us the truth.
One final sting: Even though the finale of AJLT was as undercooked as Miranda’s turkey, it felt the truest to SATC. At last, the characters spent time together and bantered with some ease. That’s heartbreaking, because it feels like the showrunners could see how to fix it, but now never will. Our hope-watching is over.
