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From left: Nya (Karen Pittman), Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) and Seema (Sarita Choudhury) swap tales of sex and the city in And Just Like That's second season.Handout
The Sex and the City franchise is one of my most enduring entertainment girlfriends, but she’s been testing my loyalty for years. As season two of the follow-up series And Just Like That arrives on Max June 22 – critics received seven episodes – I can’t help but wonder why I’ve stayed in this relationship.
Like all friendships, the original HBO SATC series (1998 – 2004) had its flaws and missteps, but the rewards were worth it. Not so the sequels. The movie Sex and the City (2008) was terrible – dull, uncomfortable and too lavish, it was wrong from its first line, “Women come to New York City for labels and love.” SATC knew that women come to New York for work, adventure and to create themselves. The film sequel Sex and the City 2 (2010) was so execrable I can’t even talk about it.
When And Just Like That arrived in 2021, 17 years after SATC wrapped, I fantasized that showrunner Michael Patrick King had found a device like the ones in Men in Black that could zap the films from our memories and return our friends – writer Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), attorney Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) and homemaker Charlotte (Kristen Davis) – to what made us fall for them. (Unfortunately, PR exec Samantha, played by Kim Cattrall, isn’t part of season one.) Albeit with necessary corrections: making their world more diverse and less privileged, and addressing the original’s fat and trans phobias.
Crushing disappointment. In SATC, Carrie and company were always current. If a cultural movement was happening or sexual more was shifting, they were hashing it out over diner breakfast. In AJLT season one, by contrast, it’s as if the characters have been cryogenically frozen for 17 years, and are emerging to find themselves shocked by what has transpired. People text now! They choose their pronouns! They have friends who aren’t white! SATC Miranda would have had subscriptions to 30 history podcasts, but AJLT Miranda doesn’t know how to listen to one? Come on. (AJLT betrays Miranda over and over.) There are so many plot gaffes and so much cringey dialogue a savvy friend told me she’s embarrassed she ever liked SATC.
But I know why I loved SATC, and helplessly love it still. Because sometimes, the characters talk to one another the way women actually talk. In 1998 television, that was rare. The top-rated series starring women that year were Friends (beloved, but quippier), Veronica’s Closet (network raunchy), Touched by an Angel (sentimental) and Ally McBeal (deliberately not realistic). SATC was an order of magnitude more honest, especially for someone my age, who’d graduated high school knowing that women are just as sexual as men and that slut-shaming is absurd, but whose pop culture hadn’t figured out what the next step looked like.
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Season two inches closer to the spirit of SATC. There are fewer moments of wannabe-wokeness and more conversations of the kind fiftysomething women actually have.Handout
SATC wanted to figure it out. The first episode that made me sit up was #104, when Charlotte’s date asks for anal sex, and the four friends hold an emergency meeting in a car to discuss the pros and cons. Frank discussions kept unfurling, about sex buddies, faked orgasms, impotence, premature ejaculation. Yet the sex talk paled next to the friendship talk. These women discussed stuff I wanted to think about – money, class, power – through a female-enough lens.
And then there were moments I just recognized: the way Miranda holds Carrie’s hair back when she throws up on the beach, or Charlotte reads Mr. Big’s wedding announcement to Carrie. The way Carrie comes over to Miranda’s to eat Oreos when Miranda hears a ghost, and Miranda comes over to Carrie’s to eat Twizzlers and dissect a phone message from Mr. Big. The bra-fitting scene after Miranda’s mother dies. The way Carrie laughs when she’s stoned, and Samantha throws her head back to laugh when Miranda regifts a dancing frog statue to her chirpy decorator.
The way Charlotte explodes at Samantha, “Is your vagina in the New York guidebooks?” and then apologizes with a muffin basket. Samantha forgives her, but only after this triumphant riposte: “You said what you came to say? Because I have a tour group coming through my vagina in 10 minutes.” The palpable, sad tension that morphs into an argument in season six, when Carrie tells Miranda she’s giving up her column to move to Paris.
The lovely shorthand in the conversation about fathers that Carrie and Miranda have on Carrie’s stoop: Carrie asks, “Can it really be as simple as, my father left when I was little, so I don’t understand men?” Miranda replies, “My father came home at 7 every night, and I don’t know anything about men either.”
And especially episode #411, the one that made me gasp in a good way, when Miranda contemplates having an abortion, and Carrie and Samantha tell her why they had theirs. Waiting in the clinic, Miranda asks Carrie, “When did you feel normal again?”
“Any day now,” Carrie replies, crossing her fingers. Then the nurse calls Miranda’s name, and she mutters a word that starts with mother but means something entirely different, and I think maybe that’s the moment that keeps me loyal.
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Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) and Che (Sara Ramirez) return in the reboot's second season.Handout
Legions are equally steadfast. Tours that ferry guests to SATC locations including the restaurant Pastis, the Magnolia Bakery and the Paris cinema are frantically popular. (The tours now include SJP, the West Village shoe store Parker owns, where she sometimes waits on customers. Those who proffer their tour voucher receive 10 per cent off.) The exterior of Carrie’s apartment, which was set on the Upper East Side but actually is in Greenwich Village, is such a hot selfie spot that a posted sign begs people to stay off the stoop.
I witnessed the mania first-hand when I was interviewing Parker about her HBO series Divorce at a Greenwich Village restaurant, and a twenty-something Australian woman taking the SATC tour stumbled in to use the restroom. Glimpsing Parker, she froze, screamed a full-throated, Beatles-at-Shea-Stadium scream and collapsed to her knees, sobbing. Parker, incredibly kind, tried to engage her in conversation, but the woman could not stop crying. Eventually I had to offer to walk her out.
Though SATC never got the glory that other HBO series did for changing the television landscape – The Sopranos, The Wire, The Larry Sanders Show – numerous shows stand on its shoulders, including Girls, Insecure, Broad City and Hacks. Flawed as AJLT season one was, it broke the streaming record for Max. And when word leaked that Cattrall had taped a voice-over phone conversation for the final episode of season two, the internet exploded.
I’m happy to say that AJLT season two inches closer to the spirit of SATC. There are fewer moments of wannabe-wokeness, more blending in of the new friends, and more conversations of the kind fifty-something women actually have – about widowhood, postdivorce guilt, the men you find in the midlife dating pool and the strange feeling of buying condoms for your kids.
The frankest moment: After intercourse, real estate agent Seema (Sarita Choudhury) reaches for a vibrator, because sometimes a woman has to finish things herself. And just like that, I was hopeful that my loyalty isn’t in vain, that my relationship with this franchise might recover. Any day now.
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