Though Michael Patrick King can insist all he wants that the reason And Just Like That… has come to an end is because “while…writing the last episode of [the season], it became clear to me this might be a wonderful place to stop,” the real truth is out of the bag. Hence, the emphasis on the phrase might be in his missive. For there’s absolutely no doubt that King and co. would’ve, er, carried on with the show were it not for the increasingly cacophonous criticism of the series, ranging from the absurdity of a certain oversized gingham hat to the narrative plot hole of Lisa Todd Wexley’s (Nicole Ari Parker) father dying twice (with the writers trying to backpedal by insisting that the father Lisa mentioned dying to Charlotte [Kristin Davis] in season one was her stepfather…in which case, why not clarify that very important nuance in the dialogue?).
But it wasn’t just “little details” like these that made the show so, well, batshit crazy. It was also the enduring, willfully oblivious bubble of privilege and delusion these characters continued to inhabit even after years of post-Sex and the City dissection that extended to such topics as Carrie’s narcissism, the total lack of realism behind a freelance writer’s “salary” in relation to affording an array of designer shoes/haute couture and, of course, the glaring (read: glaringly white) lack of diversity portrayed in a city as “multi-toned” as New York. The latter topic is what And Just Like That…did its “best” to address with the incorporation of two new women into the friend group (that still couldn’t fill the void left by Kim Cattrall a.k.a. Samantha Jones’ absence—a sound decision on her part, as it unsurprisingly turned out). For a time, even three—back when Nya Wallace (Karen Pittman) was getting scene time in seasons one and two as Miranda’s friend. This serving to emphasize the notion that, throughout And Just Like That…, the women of color intended to single-handedly prove the series’ “evolution” were ultimately being done a disservice as a result of being presented as little more than “caricatures and props for the white women who play opposite them.”
After Nya disappeared from the narrative (due to Pittman’s departure to focus on other projects), the women meant to “sub” for Samantha became the aforementioned Lisa, a fellow mother in Charlotte’s Upper East Side private school orbit, and Seema Patel (Sarita Choudhury), Carrie Bradshaw’s (Sarah Jessica Parker) real estate agent-turned-most obvious Samantha stand-in (even as King tried to placate the audience with many extremely lame text exchanges between the two, with Ms. Jones relegated to being “off in London” after cutting Carrie and co. out of her life—just one of many ways in which And Just Like That… ostensibly seeks to retroactively taint the original SATC).
Yet it seems that audiences—or at least those committed to steadfastly hate-watching the series—could have forgiven (or rather, let slide) almost anything, save for the cardinal sin at the center of the series: showing women who were once viewed “a certain way” (i.e., more youthful) as having aged. And, considering that these four women were already “pushing boundaries” on Sex and the City simply by playing single women in their thirties (indeed, Davis mentions a number of times on her podcast how liberating it felt not to have to pretend like she was still in her twenties in order to land the role), perhaps they ought to have known they were “asking too much” of the proverbial audience with And Just Like That… In short, asking the audience to “allow” them to be depicted during this era of their lives—their fifties (going on sixties). A phase in life that few who originally watched Sex and the City are comfortable with seeing as it serves as some kind of harbinger. A warning that age, de facto, cringeworthiness is coming for them too. For that, in many regards, is a key aspect of what it is to age: to no longer give a fuck about being what “the kids” are still calling cringe (that word by now way overused and run into the ground).
But even the erstwhile Sex and the City women couldn’t make aging seem “glamorous” (especially not after Carrie slipped and fell on her back or Charlotte kept dealing with random bouts of vertigo), or even “okay.” (What’s more, if you’re going to live in NYC at that age, AJLT makes it further obvious that having a lot of money is crucial.) After all, even the ultimate anti-ageism crusader in mainstream pop culture, Madonna, hasn’t made much headway on changing people’s minds about it—not even the minds of fellow women, who ought to be all for what Madonna is championing: the freedom to keep living as one wishes and not be limited by the societally imposed confines and stereotypes of being “old,” which are placed most burdensomely on the shoulders of women.
This is something Madonna acknowledged throughout her searing Billboard Woman of the Year speech back in 2016, telling the audience, in a tone dripping with irony, “Do not age. Because to age is a sin. You will be criticized and vilified…” This warning most assuredly being a factor in the venomous reaction toward AJLT’s very existence feeding the already already-present ire for the series’ many unhinged plotlines (most especially when it comes to Carrie and Miranda).
Of course, most would swear up and down that their own deep-seated, deeply ingrained sense of ageism has nothing to do with their contempt for And Just Like That… That it’s the “plots alone” driving them mad. But there’s so clearly more to it than that, and maybe even the presence of palatable narrative directions couldn’t have warmed audiences to this “next chapter” in the lives of Carrie Bradshaw and her coterie of “fabulous friends.” A concept that Lena Waithe touched upon during her appearance on Davis’ Are You A Charlotte? podcast, commenting, “Women get a little frustrated with And Just Like That… because what it’s showing is sort of, ‘This is what it is to age, this is what it is to have children that are not babies, to have a husband that has now died or to explore your sexuality after fifty.’ Then it’s sort of like, ‘Oh, I’m being confronted…’ What I think you guys are saying is life isn’t done.”
This is more or less what Davis has repeated often throughout the press tours promoting season three, insisting that life always remains interesting and filled with stories worth telling at any age, so why not tell the stories of these beloved characters? The answer, in part, is more questions (yes, how very Carrie): why do these women in particular need to be shown in their later years? Why not just make an entirely separate series or movie that addresses the unique joys and challenges of being an NYC woman in her fifties?
And then, of course, there’s the main reason why AJLT was doomed to fail: the women—the thirty-something women—of SATC are forever embedded in the cultural consciousness as a quartet that is vibrant and in step with/a reflection of the times (for, skewed as the portrayal was, Sex and the City was the 2000s). And Just Like That… doesn’t offer any such lens through which to view the remaining trio and their “add-ons.” Not even via the children of Charlotte and Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), who come across as though they were written by a much older adult grasping at straws in terms of what they think youth is like now.
But it’s something else Waithe said on Davis’ podcast that really cuts to the core of why so many have been affronted by And Just Like That…: “You guys really are a fairy tale for people so it’s almost like somebody sayin’, ‘Let’s go see how Cinderella’s doin’. It’s like, ‘I don’t wanna know how Cinderella’s doin’, I wanna just think she’s happy and livin’ her life in the castle.’” Or, as Carrie once put it in the season three finale episode, Cock a Doodle Do!,” “Don’t worry, they have a very lovely life.” Going back to see what they’re doing now conflicts with that belief, that assurance. And even the post-SATC movies treaded on dangerous territory in revisiting the characters (though at least Samantha was still around), especially Sex and the City 2, wherein Michael Patrick King initially foreshadowed the whole annoying return of Aidan (John Corbett) thing.
To be sure, Aidan was a very significant reason for why season three was so atrocious—an utter trainwreck—to watch. Particularly when he had the audacity to cheat on Carrie and get her immediate forgiveness in a way that was in total opposition to the way he treated in her in season three of SATC after finding out about the Big (Chris Noth) affair. Granted, that was hardly the only issue with the show, and season three in particular, which scraped the bottom of the barrel on plotlines so hard that they had to use a deodorant and plant “snafu” on Seema in two separate episodes, landing on a comedic tone more in the vein of I Love Lucy than Sex and the City (though that might actually be insulting to I Love Lucy). Despite all of its problems, the show did become a phenomenon in its own right, drawing its approximately 400,000 viewers (another bad omen) in each week solely for the “benefit” of seeing how much worse it could get. This being an eerie metaphor for people wanting, in effect, to see how much worse “later life” in general could get.
In point of fact, many had actually grown rather fond of tearing the show apart, counting on it as a weekly release, of sorts. Case in point, Vulture writer Rachel Handler commenting on the abrupt cancellation by stating that they’ve “always [ragged on AJLT] in the way that [they] would rag on a beloved younger sibling with a minor head injury that was going to improve with time—lightly, lovingly, trying not to let them fall asleep mid-sentence” (again, not exactly “high praise”). But it was another rumination in the article that broached something larger about why And Just Like That… was so upsetting to and, ultimately, scary for viewers: “There was something renegade about it, something deeply irreverent. It was confusing. It was unstable. It was reckless. It was challenging. It was free. Maybe too free.” In other words, these women embodied the oft-memed phrase, “I am cringe, but I am free.” The nature, to reiterate, of what it means to get older. Though it seems no matter how old Carrie gets, she’ll never not care about what she’s wearing…even if what she cares about wearing happens to be, for instance, a massive gingham bonnet.
Maybe what truly did AJLT in, however, was its attempt to be, in some sense, everything to everyone (particularly the women of color and LGBTQIA+ community the show failed during its first go-around). This when all that anybody really wanted was for it to just be the way it was. Which would, of course, require a time machine to go back to the late 90s/early 00s. In other words, nothing gold can stay—and that’s what fundamentally triggered AJLT viewers, even if they couldn’t quite verbalize or “pinpoint” the underlying why behind their vitriol. Yes, apart from the plots…and the losing thereof.
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