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Every Thursday for the past nine Thursdays I have endured the journey through funhouse mirrors that is And Just Like That, and every Thursday I come away feeling mystified, heartbroken, and gaslit. Whether they’re turning my girl Charlotte into a pedophile, my beloved Stanford into a Shinto Monk, or using phrases like “comedy concert,” causing me to wonder whether AI really is writing our content these days, this show has been a big middle finger to the Sex And The City ride-or-dies. But in last week’s episode, a seemingly unimportant couple seconds of dialog upset me so deeply that I just need to come here and process my feelings.
The scene happens when Sima (admittedly a good character and one of the only ones, including our three main girls, who consistently feels in any way connected to the Sex And The City extended universe), comes over to Carrie’s apartment with lunch for the two of them and declares that they have a disaster on their hands. She has told Ravi, the movie director she and we have known for about ninety seconds of screen time, that she loves him:
CARRIE: And the disaster is?
SIMA: I said it too soon. Like out of nowhere. It totally surprised me. It’s only been three and a half weeks. I haven’t even vetted him. I don’t know if this is gonna work out. I don’t know what happened last night. I was feeling so much.
CARRIE: Love?
SIMA: And other things. He was inside me when I said it.
CARRIE: (motioning to the single edamame in her hand) Eating.
SIMA: What is wrong with me? I’ve just thrown away thirty years of smart dating. Like that.
CARRIE: My point of view as of late, if you feel love - run after it. Give it all you have. Hold back nothing. Except for certain explicit details while I’m trying to enjoy my sushi.
How did we get to a place where our sex columnist protagonist who used to discuss funky spunk over brunch can’t hear a polite mention of missionary sex without losing her appetite? We’ve watched Carrie attend a live tantra workshop where Miranda got jizzed on. She coached Charlotte through anal sex in the back of a cab. She gathered the girlies for an evening of gay porn at Samantha’s. She spied on her neighbors fucking through the very window she’s seated next to in the edamame moment — while eating gummy bears!!
Listen, I get canceling your rice pudding for the spunk convo, but sex shaming a friend for doing it with their lover? Babe — what is going on! True, Carrie has never been the most sexually adventurous herself. Samantha even names it in S2E16 when Carrie is discouraging her from having a threesome with two gay friends who want to try being with a woman for the first time — “you know for a sex columnist you have a very limited view of sexuality… it’s 2000! The new millennium won’t be about sexual labels it will be about sexual expression. It won’t matter if you’re sleeping with men or women, it will be about sleeping with individuals. Soon, everyone will be pansexual.”
Samantha was right, but the way the show has heeded her prophecy has been all wrong. And Just Like That has spent two seasons shimmying its way into ill-fitting political correctness and ham-fisted inclusion, and the Sex And The City fandom has, rightly, completely lost its mind on social media. And as I watched the complaints echo across Twitter this past week, I couldn’t help but wonder whether we are a rancid fandom, like the fans of Star Wars, or Drag Race. Whether the thing we love will always cause us more suffering than enjoyment. Whether we simply can never be happy with what we’re given.
But I don’t think so. I think the rage goes deeper than that. We loved Sex And The City. I loved Sex And The City. In our tween years my best friend and I religiously watched each episode over and over again, jamming one DVD from the box set after another into their tiny bedroom TV (sustaining the occasional cut from those sharp vinyl covers — we BLED for this show, ok??). The four girls inducted me into sexual adulthood and formed the (admittedly flawed) bedrock of my sexual identity. And many of the episodes hold up today! Sure the toxic bisexual episode is a mess, but, speaking as a bisexual, a fun mess!
Our problem with AJLT is not just its empty, after-school-special instructiveness about race and gender theory (Michael Patrick King, you are not the answer to our broken public school system). Or its bizarrely large cast of characters that often leaves our beloved three girls as a D-plot in an episode about Che Diaz at the animal hospital (that sentence makes me feel like I’m losing my mind). Our main problem isn’t even Season 1’s relative lack of sex. It’s the fact that the show has absolutely no memory about who these women are or why we love them.
Sex And The City was a success not because of its jokes or its outfits, although both were as on point as you could be in the Y2K era, but because of its tight episodic structure and sharp point of view. Almost every episode was an exploration of how sex collides with and often unseats our beliefs, how it complicates our self image. This focus on compelling logical inconsistencies plays out in the hotel elevator in S3E09 as the married Mr. Big presses Carrie against the wall:
BIG: I made a mistake.
He kisses Carrie
CARRIE: Fuck you.
BIG: I love you.
He kisses Carrie again
CARRIE: Fuck you.
He kisses Carrie a third time
CARRIE (voiceover): My mind was yelling how angry I was. But my heart. My heart.
CARRIE: (whispering into’s Big’s ear) Fuck me.
We cut to Carrie and Big, postcoital, sharing a cigarette in bed
CARRIE (voiceover): And just like that, I lost my head.
SATC frequently threw our girls into scenarios where love, pheromones, sex, and feelings surprised them. Whether it’s Charlotte’s dream WASPy prince turning out to have impotence issues, Miranda falling for a bartender who calls her to tell her to look at the moon, or Samantha fucking her way into a committed relationship with Smith, it was these kinds of unexpected pairings that rang true like the emotional versions of a perfect Patricia Field outfit — a seven dollar dress to go with your three hundred dollar shoes, if you will.
As for AJLT, I’ve played games of The Sims with less convenient wish fulfillment. Every plot plays out like an Ariana Grande lyric: Carrie wants a magical real estate solution to Aidan’s reticence to enter her apartment — “I want it, I got it.” Miranda wants a new career path — “I want it, I got it.” But beyond its total lack of stakes or dramatic tension, AJLT’s most egregious error was eliminating the Carrie Voiceover. Because the glue that held SATC together was Carrie’s penchant for questions and yet total inability to learn anything. The current show isn’t curious. It has all the answers, even about things it really doesn’t have the answers to (Toby asking Che “is it ok if I call you enby?” as though enby is an offensive slur?? What is going on?? ) The show is the embodiment of the way certain people will confidently shout “THEIR PRONOUNS ARE THEY” without doing even one second of reflection on why we’re complicating the gender binary in the first place.
So after spending a year ruminating about what’s going on here, I think the truth is very simple. Rich people don’t fuck.
Yes, sure, they may have sex, but they don’t fuck. Fucking has stakes. Fucking understands your identity to be centered on your body and emotions, not your fancy job or ridiculously huge apartment. Real Fucking? Fucking worth fighting for? That kind of fucking is anti-capitalist. Because it might throw you into a tailspin and make you realize, horror of horrors, that you are enough without the trappings of your status, your stuff, or your job. It might shake you enough to make your revaluate your priorities, make you shift gears, make you chase something that doesn’t make sense on paper. Because when we’re narrowly focused only on what’s on paper? We get Bradley Meego.
Don’t get me wrong, I know the SATC girls were always materialistic, always blatantly in search of an investment banker to marry so they could shore up some status and security in this world. I don’t judge that at all — get your (Hermes) bag! Enjoy your success! But it feels like the wealth not only onscreen but off has blinded this whole project to the basics of messy humanity. There’s an elephant in the center of the show, and that’s the fact that, I’m sorry, MPK and SJP have been huffing the fumes of apartments with stairs inside them and designer stores so long that they think life is all about the three-hundred dollar shoes. They’ve forgotten about the seven dollar dress entirely. It’s not high/low. It’s just high on its own supply.
And Just Like That doesn’t fuck because it doesn’t risk anything. It doesn’t fuck because it doesn’t remember anything. It doesn’t fuck because it hasn’t taken the subway in decades. It’s not sweaty, it’s not striving. It’s air-conditioned. The emotional math isn’t math-ing because the privilege at play has confused the people at the top of this show about what a story is. A story is not a slideshow about Female Empowerment. A story is not just casting diverse people, but giving them something real to do onscreen. A story has a clear protagonist who is a deeply flawed person! We loved that Carrie was a bad person. As evidenced by this meme (“Carrie” portrayed by the one and only Chad Michaels) that has blown up in recent weeks:
Well, maybe we didn’t love it but it was definitely cunt. Frankly, she lost me when she didn’t pee on John Slattery (bag fumbling of a lifetime). But the show kept me until the very last gasp.
My hopes for tomorrow’s finale are in the absolute gutter. Can a season 3 without Kim Cattrall have any hopes of delivering the catharsis we desire? What is it we even want?
If I could pass my wishlist along to the writer’s room, I would start with Carrie losing all her money, and having to move back to the studio (AGAIN) and start living a life she can write about. I want to see her Drunk At Vogue ™ at 60. I want to see Miranda go through a dozen other queer heartbreaks (no more cat litter though, please!) and reckon with polyamory and gender and all the dating issues of today with her signature Miranda Boundaries. As for Charlotte? I just want to see my girl Charlotte respected, and be funny without being the butt of the joke. Maybe she should put on some shiny thigh high black boots and dom Harry a little bit, idk!! I want the kids GONE I don’t care how it happens, I want LTW’s boring husband to get a job in the foreign service and leave forever, I want LTW and Charlotte to kiss a lil bit, I want Naya to be on a completely different show so I can enjoy her without feeling like she’s fighting the other girls for screen time, I want Che Diaz to get sent to a farm upstate (with all the animals!!), and most of all? I want Samantha back.
So I guess what I’m really saying is… Lisette spin off?
I have to sit down while "That kind of fucking is anti-capitalist" finishes cannon balling through my brain
Carrie is SO sex negative in AJLT, she is constantly plugging her ears at the threat of someone else mentioning a good fuck. The thing that really sent me off a cliff with this season though was when Ché imposed a *surprise* threesome with their ex on Miranda, and when Miranda impressively tries to process it aloud--saying, btw, that her initial visceral reaction is NO-- Ché goes, “it’s getting less hot the more you talk.” 🤯🫨 So many layers, too many layers. 😭 😭