And just like that, it was over. Friday’s announcement by the showrunner Michael Patrick King that the third series of And Just Like That would be its last was met with little surprise and I suspect some relief. Following a forthcoming two-part finale, Carrie Bradshaw will hang up her Manolos for good – and not a moment too soon.
If a theme could be pulled from the scrambled threads of the third season of the Sex and the City reboot, it is, I think, the question of appearance versus reality. Early on in the series, rattled by the discovery of a rat infestation in her meadowy garden, Carrie seeks comfort from Aidan, the man she’s technically in a relationship with but due to a muddled and implausible arrangement, can’t actually be with for five years. Carrie thought her garden was perfect, she says, “but I just wasn’t looking underneath”.
After three seasons of And Just Like That the answer to what lies beneath is, I fear, nothing. Take the shoes – in a frankly criminal throwback to one of the best plotlines of the original show, Carrie namechecks a superior earlier episode as she complains about her curmudgeonly downstairs neighbour asking her to remove her stilettos in the house. In A Woman’s Right to Shoes, Carrie’s stolen Manolo Blahniks stood for, in no particular order, the gulf that can open between friends at different life stages, the way marriage and motherhood are celebrated when the milestones of an independent life are not, attention inequity in friendships, and a woman’s right to spend her money however the hell she chooses. In Under the Table, Carrie’s shoes signify … that she has a crush.
That’s not to say And Just Like That hasn’t had its moments of insight – they just tend to be immediately binned in favour of something silly. Despite episodes averaging 40 minutes in length, this season has been the trimmest so far, with excisions both necessary (Che Diaz) and unexplained (Nya) giving the remaining characters room to breathe. Seema learns that the key to romance is not pretending to be someone else, but letting go of the desire to be seen in a certain way. Lisa flounders in her attempt to balance work and family life. Charlotte, previously troubled by such challenges as the cancellation of her dog, finally gets a storyline worthy of her default mode of hysteria when Harry is diagnosed with prostate cancer.
Nicole Ari Parker, Kristin Davis, Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon and Sarita Choudhury. Photograph: Tom Nicholson/Rex/Shutterstock
Charlotte and Lisa’s Park Avenue-set struggles with family life have some meat to them, but are bedevilled by every interaction with their children seeming to have come straight out of a toothpaste advertisement, or hell. See: Charlotte freaking out about not being able to work the party circuit to sell art as her smug children talk about veganism and polyamory, or the Todd Wexley family’s cringe banter and Lisa’s dismissive comments that her husband should start Ozempic.
At times like these the show feels like a charmless sitcom about the super-rich. In Sex and the City, the weekends in the Hamptons were just the backdrop to more resonant storytelling – in And Just Like That, sometimes the setting is the story. In one scene, Charlotte begins to spiral at Tiffany’s, wondering if life is as fragile as the glass cabinets around her – but what might have been a serious meditation on midlife and mortality morphs into an unfunny joke about which society events Bitsy von Muffling is and isn’t invited to. Sometimes these vignettes verge on outright cruelty – after Lisa’s nemesis is marked as a gauche interloper by her Michael Kors handbag (wrong kind of designer, honey), it’s a lot harder to see her mother-in-law’s pronouncement that she has no time for the working class as mere satire.
Meanwhile, the inexplicably homeless Miranda deflowers a nun, becomes a meme and gains a girlfriend, who, in lieu of a personality, possesses two Italian greyhounds and vile British colleagues apparently scooped straight from the cutting room floor of Too Much. It’s not until the 10th episode that we get to see Miranda, who barely resembles the beloved judgmental ice queen of Sex and the City, do the first Miranda-y thing of the entire series so far, when she stalks the woman her son got pregnant.
The one bright spot of the season has been its treatment of Carrie’s faltering relationship with Aidan. A standout episode in which she visits him in Virginia sees a diminished Carrie, too afraid to ask for what she wants, settling for the smallest thing he can offer her – a spot in the guesthouse. Carrie switches her magenta Vivienne Westwood for a “sister wives” prairie dress, to attempt the role of cool country stepmum. But the performance of a happy blended family falls to pieces in a rare decent domestic scene, in which resentment and alienation explode into a conflict that ends with a broken window and a return to reality.
Sarah Jessica Parker and John Corbett. Photograph: Craig Blankenhorn/© 2023 WarnerMedia Direct, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
The relationship eventually crumbles when Carrie realises that no matter how she changes for Aidan – selling her apartment, not being a brat in the countryside (remember Suffern?) – he cannot move past her previous infidelity. This, to me, is the point of returning to a story decades later: to show how people change, and how they don’t. How the cracks in a relationship can run so deep that even the layering sediment of time can’t fill them in, but only hide them. When Carrie finally ended it, I felt a tug of genuine emotion that can only come from having spent so much time with these characters.
A lot has been made this season of the idea of the hate-watch, especially given Miranda’s obsession with a Love Island-style show called Bi Bingo. “I finally discovered the joy of hate-watching,” she says, in what I assume is meant to be a winning nod at self-awareness by the showrunners.
The thing is, I don’t believe that’s what those of us who loved Sex and the City (for who else would bother watching And Just Like That through three unexceptional seasons?) were doing. I’d describe it as something closer to hope-watching. We wanted to see the characters we loved, women once so convincingly and lovingly drawn, being flirty, frivolous and fabulously dressed in New York City. But more than that, we held out hope that something substantial might still remain beneath the sparkle. In two episodes’ time we’ll finally know the answer – and if we’re disappointed again, at least it’ll be for the last time.