And Just Like That… another season is finished. The Sex And The City reboot, which has just completed its second series, is a show I want to tune in to watch every single week of my life, and yet I cannot stand that it exists. And although season two was far in excess better than the atrocious errors of season one, I “can't help but wonder” (to use a Carrie Bradshaw-ism): why did we decide we wanted any part in this?
For those of you who don't like Sex And The City, I'm sorry and who do you think you are. You can leave now if you want, but please do so quietly. And for those of you who worship the lives of Carrie, Miranda Hobbs, Charlotte York and Samantha “I love you, but I love me more!” Jones, you'll agree with me that it's not that any of us particularly want to watch And Just Like That…, it's that we feel we have no choice. Just like we don't have a choice when a family member is having open heart surgery and we have to turn up to the hospital. No, the problem isn't us. It's the creators of an HBO classic who have resurrected our old friends for this reunion 12 years after we last saw them in the Sex And The City 2 movie (yes, the one where they go to Abu Dhabi), thereby bringing them back into our living rooms, and into our hearts, but for what reason?
Well, as was widely commented upon when the first season aired last year, Michael Patrick King et al appeared to bring three of the girls back (Kim Cattrall who played the legendary Samantha Jones refused to work on this project… because she is incredibly wise) to primarily apologize for all that came before. The show was so overtly progressive it was erect with woke corrections, jizzing them about without any successful landings, much like Charlotte's ex-husband Trey (poor Trey). The dialogue revolved around new gender language and Miranda's character was leading that charge; she was apologizing to her new Black professor for her white privilege, she was crushing on Carrie's non-binary colleague at her podcast job, she was avoiding husband and all-round good guy Steve (ie, bar tender Bruce Springsteen) and… she was becoming a lesbian? While rewriting the characters' histories, the show creators were also stripping the gals of some of their most definitive traits in a bid to make them seem more “fluid” (to use the mot du jour). And while that may have seemed admirable on the face of it, it failed for two reasons. One: it rendered three feminist women who were individually formidable and familiar personas on our screens in their thirties and forties now fifty-something calamities of their own midlife crises; Two: it focused on them as political statements at the expense of actually evolving who they were as women, both within themselves, and outwardly towards each other as friends.
By season two, the experiment was just getting weirder, and while Carrie was still ordering Cosmopolitans, everything else about her felt a lot more sober. Now a widow, Carrie exists no longer in pursuit of the story of love, sex and relationships in New York, but rather in homage to her past, and specifically to her past men. Where Carrie was never as independent as – say – Samantha or Miranda, she wasn't a pillow for a man to lay his head on, and in season two, she signs up to be Aidan's after he walks right back into her life again after two decades apart. (I always hated Aidan, and I was right). And it leaves her no room for growth, no space for grief, no time for something completely different. And while Aidan takes up all the air in the room, Carrie displays the most rotten behavior as a friend, even for Carrie's shitty track record of rotten behavior as a friend. And worse yet, her friends have given up on calling her out on it. Even after Miranda and her non-binary partner Che split up, Carrie attends Che's stand-up. She invites Che to her final dinner party in her apartment. So Carrie and Che used to work together, but where the hell is her loyalty to Miranda? Who invites their best friend's ex to their get-together at their small apartment? It could never be me. The show is so caught up in the wokeisms and the saying sorry for its perfectly excusable history, that it forgets that the most rewarding thing it could have done would have been to work on our leading lady's humanity. (Sidenote: why does Carrie suddenly have a kitten? The kitten is very cute. But Carrie would never have a kitten anywhere near her shoe closet. Is she a cat lady now?)
Anyway, Miranda just rolls over. What? Miranda Hobbs! In the 2000s, Miranda was who every woman aspired to be. She was the one. But And Just Like That… positions Miranda in a perpetual state of identity implosion. Miranda isn't the same character she once was – at all. She starts working as an intern (!!!) for Human Rights Watch (Miranda was the BOSS of all bosses). She's nervous to go on the BBC to do a TV spot. She doesn't know whether she's a lesbian or a bisexual or just confused. (Cue: some truly embarrassing biphobia in this season, ie, total erasure of bisexuality. Miranda is clearly bi. What's the big deal in establishing so?) The Miranda of yore would never have stayed in a gross apartment waiting for someone to potentially have sex with her, but she contemplates doing so just so she can try to have sex with another woman, and figure out her orientation. In what world?
Where Sex And The City was held together by the friendships between four very different New York women, And Just Like That… redefines the remaining three women (and the other new female characters) in the context of who they're with, either successfully or otherwise. Their independence and simultaneous reliance on one another's friendship was always the thru-line. But now I'd go as far to say that the men in the show – Harry, Steve and Aidan – have become the foundational rocks while their female counterparts are flailing about at sea. And most odd of all is that by the end of this season, Charlotte has the most desirable reality, with her husband Harry, her two (very annoying) kids, and her extremely heteronormative life. Amazingly, Charlotte is the lesser of the cookie-cutter caricatures here, and shows the most vulnerability in her plot lines. If Charlotte is the most relatable, then clearly modesty is the name of And Just Like That's game.
And that’s the tragedy. Sex And The City was anathema to modesty. It was groundbreaking television. It put a woman's orgasm front and center in the most mainstream way. It catapulted sales of sex toys. It popularized frank and open discussion about all manner of sexy things, including female masturbation, oral sex and fertility struggles (not sexy, per se, but definitely taboo). There are so many obvious risks that the creators clearly refused to take for the sake of scoring intersectionality points over exploring real human interest plots. What about exploring the real power imbalance that existed between Carrie and Big, and how that affects her now he's dead? What about prying more into the absence of Samantha and how that loss of that friendship has left the other girls adrift? Dare I say it, they could have even killed Samantha off, and explored the phenomenon of mourning the loss of what the show always portrayed as every modern woman’s real soulmate – her best friend. (However, I am not ungrateful that Samantha made a brief but tear-inducing appearance during the season finale. Thank you, we are not worthy. Please stay Samantha Jones. Please. Don’t leave us this way.)
And Just Like That… relies on our sense of familiarity with the world of Carrie and pals, bringing back old flames, excusing the flawed and stagnant identities of our original leads, and not making real leaps forward where they would count. And yet despite the lean into familiarity… What’s with the clothes. Fashion was always the fifth character, and now the creators seem to be playing it safe. And unnecessarily so. There’s no reason to get conservative just because Carrie’s in her fifties. We miss the old Carrie, and by we, I mean Ben and I. (Ben is the Stanford Blatch to my Carrie Bradshaw).
I mean, Carrie kinda lost her spunk, right? Where is the edge?
More to the point, though, Carrie hasn’t learned anything. She hasn’t grown. If she was my friend, I’d be having some strong words:
“You’re giving your apartment, your New York, your career, your whole identity up for a man again? Why? Break the cycle, pal. You’re still stuck in the hamster wheel. Come on. Listen to yourself, woman!”
It’s such an unfulfilling end for her. It’s unsatisfying. It’s not very empowering, is it? These women all appear to be isolated in their own issues now, and they’re not supporting each other. What changed? Why haven’t they moved forward? What got stuck? Why are we still watching them? Help?!
We all know that we should have seen the end of Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and Samantha with that all-time great final scene in season six with four fierce, brilliant, stylish women stomping all over New York City's pavements to Candi Staton's “You Got The Love” – because they had it, with each other – but instead here we are, begrudgingly bringing them out to brunch again over two decades later. And yet just like that, I cannot wait for season three.
As a mature woman (about to turn 60) who was living in NYC all through the Sex/City early years, I can tell you I am not surprised that the writers have failed these women. You have to look hard for stories about women in their 50’s and 60’s and they are often soft boiled eggs at best. Remember when Samantha said (about a grey pube she found) “no one wants to have sex with Granma!”. Well that is largely how women are portrayed after 50: sexless, confused, sweaty because of menopause. And that’s if those women still wear a size 6 and have “made an effort”. Miranda went from being a badass to figuring out how to have sex she likes and wants. That’s the prefect colonized patriarchal arc to her story. I can’t watch it anymore to be honest. I’m one of those, sorry. I’d rather miss them then see them written into history as having flamed out into lost souls who need men to be their rocks🤮. What I’d love to see is older mature women portrayed as the multitasking, multilayered Sisters that we are.
I can honestly say I've not seen a single episode of it. 😮