This week, the Sex and the City sequel series finished for good, bringing an end to the adventures of Carrie Bradshaw and friends. Here’s why it never lived up to its beloved predecessor.
Twirling in high heels and a sparkly pink ballgown, singing along to Barry White’s You’re The First, The Last, My Everything, Carrie Bradshaw danced out of our lives forever in the show’s final ever episode, which aired in the US last night.
Craig Blankenhorn/ MaxAnd Just Like That – the sequel series to Sex and The City – had only clocked up three seasons (half of its predecessor) but a few weeks ago, amid reported falling ratings, showrunner Michael Patrick King announced out of the blue on the show’s Instagram account that the series would be the final ever. “It became clear to me that this might be a wonderful place to stop,” he explained, adding: “the ongoing storytelling of the Sex and the City universe is coming to an end”. Sarah Jessica Parker – who has played the writer-cum-hopeless-romantic since 1998 – wrote a long tribute post on her own social media account: “Carrie Bradshaw has dominated my professional heartbeat for 27 years. I think I have loved her most of all”.
HBO MaxThe idea of a SATC sequel was met with feverish excitement when it was officially announced back in January 2021. How amazing would it be to catch up with the four, much-loved old friends – Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Charlotte (Kristin Davis), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) and Samantha (Kim Cattrall) – and revisit their lives as 50-somethings? However the show stalled at the first hurdle when it was revealed one of the original four women, Cattrall’s man-eating PR queen, would not take part. In the second season of the show, Cattrall threw fans some crumbs with a 70-second cameo, but filmed her scene without any of the other cast members.
How it failed its characters
As for the other women? When the show premiered in 2021, there was widespread disappointment at the way these confident, strong friends had become unrecognisable; and if they were older, they certainly weren’t wiser. Miranda, the straight-talking, highly intelligent lawyer was a bumbling wreck, forever blurting out the wrong thing and/or tripping up and falling over. Charlotte was a maniacally cartoonish Upper East Side mother, who also fell over lots (due, it turns out, to her sudden-onset vertigo, never mentioned before season three). And strangely Carrie, as a former sex columnist, could barely even utter the word on her short-lived podcast, having appeared to become more prudish over the intervening years. She also became even more narcissistic, and even more delusional in her romantic choices, after her great love Big (Chris Noth) died on a Peloton bike in the first episode of the reboot. King and his writers had done our girls a great disservice, was the general consensus.
Meanwhile, although the show tried to rectify the lack of diversity in the original series with various characters and storylines, these also fell flat on their faces. Miranda exploring her queerness was fine; but for many viewers, her doing this with non-binary comedian partner Che Diaz (Sara Ramirez), was not, given how cringey they were, from their awful double-entendres peppering every conversation to their downright painful stand-up shows. The Daily Beast dubbed them the “worst character on TV“. While sassy real estate mogul Seema (Sarita Choudhury) was a good addition to the girl gang, viewers queried why another woman, Lisa Todd Wexley (Nicole Ari Parker) wasn’t integrated properly with the other core friends, being kept especially separate in the third series.
Another character, Miranda’s professor Nya (Karen Pittman) was brought in as one of the new leads, then disappeared after season two. And when actor Willie Garson who played Carrie’s gay best friend Stanford Blatch, died in 2021, midway through filming, his exit was then scripted in a way many found absurd, with Stanford suddenly divorcing Anthony (Mario Cantone) and becoming a Shinto monk in Japan, never to be heard of again.
HBO MaxEven Big, Carrie’s one and only husband, was barely referred to after the first season, in the show’s great example of collective amnesia – if only the grief of a loved one could be switched off that easily in real life. At least there was finally a passing reference to him in the final episode. But for much of And Just Like That, viewers were punished with the return of Carrie’s other most significant old flame, former fiancée Aidan (John Corbett), with the couple spending the most recent series labouring over their doomed romance. Wouldn’t it have been far more interesting to see Carrie going back into the dating world, later in life, and meeting new men, some fans asked?
The chaotic writing
Instead, plot lines were thrown into the show like hand-grenades, and then never brought up again: Lisa’s miscarriage, Seema burning down her flat and Miranda and Charlotte’s teenage kids hooking up. ALJT’s biggest problem has always been its lack of cohesion and focus compared to its predecessor. Sex and the City episodes ran to a tight 25 minutes, and were always underpinned by Carrie’s voiceover: her narration formed the backbone of every episode. The two or three storylines running within each episode were all woven together neatly into the theme of Carrie’s newspaper column of that week; an exploration of a particular issue – linked to the dating world, and cleverly observed. And while some of these voiceovers were heavy-handed and involved tenuous links – only Carrie Bradshaw could equate her accidentally seeing her friend’s naked husband with The Troubles in Northern Ireland – it became a signature device that made the show tight, snappy and well-scripted.
Despite finding a few new, slightly forced ways to have Carrie’s voiceover included – the less said about her historical romance novel, which cack-handedly also reflected Carrie’s love life, the better – AJLT was rudderless because of the removal of the central conceit. To keep viewers’ attention, characters were instead forced into increasingly bizarre situations with no real pay-offs, and which made no sense for their or the plot’s progression.
The haphazardness of it all was compounded by the episodes’ bloated running time, as many ran to around 45 minutes: this week’s very final episode, Party of One, was a slight improvement, clocking in at just 33 minutes, although that meant it had to race unsubtly to tie up loose ends and give every lead a happy ending. Marriage was good! So was being a late-in-life lesbian! And Carrie was finally content without a man! “The woman was not alone. She was on her own”, she rewrote in her book’s epilogue in the closing seconds of the episode.
AlamyInterestingly, the show’s final music was the iconic Sex and The City theme tune – which only served to highlight just how far this series had fallen off the standard of the original.
Looking back over And Just Like That, there were flashes of brilliance – scenes of Seema pulling Carrie up on being a bad friend when she planned to “third wheel” her on a Hamptons holiday, or Carrie finally finding her voice to tell Aidan that their relationship wasn’t going to work, showed how engaging the show could have been. But ultimately, the whole reboot was a wasted opportunity to see a nuanced, witty and intelligent take on these women navigating their lives and relationships in middle age. And Just Like That will most likely be remembered as “What was that?” instead. / BBC News
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