Now in its third season, it’s safe to say that HBO’s Sex and the City revival And Just Like That has struggled to capture the zeitgeist in the same way as its mother series. But that all changes now because, in its most recent episode, shrugged off its tired old premise to become something new. Now it is nothing less than a show about the miracle of human reanimation.
The most recent episode was entitled Silent Mode. In it, Nicole Ari Parker’s character Lisa learned that her 90-year-old father had died. As she prepared to deliver a moving eulogy, sharp-eyed And Just Like That loyalists were all grabbed by the same sudden thought: wait, hadn’t he already died once before?
They remembered the premiere of the series, when the characters were still reeling from the sudden Peloton-adjacent death of Mr Big, and Lisa told Charlotte: “I was exactly the same when my father died last year.”
Now, some have claimed that this is lazy writing; all the major aspects of a character’s life – like how many parents they have, and the general impossibility of corporeal resurrection – should be kept in a show bible that is referenced ahead of any major plot points. However, I think it is more likely that all the characters from And Just Like That are simply members of a satanic voodoo death cult driven by the secret desire to Frankenstein all their loved ones back to life in order to kill them again, so they can revel in the hideous truth that they have become more powerful than God.
Frasier was the rare show that not only noticed the goof but actively leaned into it
Alternatively, the first dead dad was her stepdad. That’s the line the And Just Like That writers have hastily thrown together in the wake of the mistake, at least. Lisa had a stepdad, and he died, then her actual dad died a couple of years later. Would it have been easier to understand if Lisa – a character who we had known for seconds at that point – had said “stepdad” instead of “dad” in the premiere? Possibly. But it’s too late to go back and fix that now.
At the very least, And Just Like That can reassure itself that it’s not the only show to have messed up like this. When you’re making a long-running series with a large cast, it’s only natural to expect that some details will get mixed up along the way.
Good dad, bad dad … Kelsey Grammer with John Mahoney in Frasier. Photograph: Paramount/Allstar
One notorious example is Friends. In the very first episode, Monica introduces Rachel – at that point a runaway bride – to all her chums. One of them is Chandler, who she appears to be meeting for the first time. But as the series wore on and started to introduce flashbacks, we saw that Rachel had met Chandler several times previously; once shortly after getting engaged to Barry and twice more at family Thanksgiving meals. And these were only the times we saw. Perhaps Rachel had met Chandler hundreds of times before the start of the first episode. Maybe even thousands. Maybe, with this in mind, Friends actually becomes a heartbreaking tale of a woman struggling with the debilitating effects of transient global amnesia.
Something similar happened in Frasier. When Frasier Crane was simply a side character on Cheers, he once mentioned that his father had been a scientist, but was now dead. But then came the Frasier spin-off, in which one of the main characters was none other than Frasier’s dad, depicted not as a corpse in a lab coat but a gnarled retired policeman. However, Frasier was the rare show that not only noticed the goof but actively leaned into it. Martin Crane was always a police officer, it was explained, but Frasier had lied about him out of embarrassment. If people had known that his dad was a street cop and not a highfalutin academic, then Frasier’s painstakingly assembled self-image would have crumbled into a pile of ashes. A continuity error transformed into an opportunity to deepen a character. How very Frasier.
Perhaps this is something that And Just Like That can also use. Forget the wishy-washy stepfather line: let’s make Lisa an inveterate liar, who repeatedly invents bereavements in order to gain the trust of those around her. Wouldn’t that be a far more interesting direction in which to take the character? Either that or the death cult thing, which would at least liven up the show a bit.