And Just Like That… they missed the mark on vulnerability.
I was a late bloomer — I didn’t start watching Sex and the City until I was about 18. It was probably my very first binge-watch. I borrowed the DVDs from a friend in my residence and spent evenings in my dorm room, demolishing dry cereal and watching the women of the show navigate love, dating and friendship in New York.
Many of my peers agree with the ‘pioneer-status’ ascribed to SATC. It was a juggernaut that depicted women as complex characters beyond their romantic relationships. It normalized women frankly and candidly discussing intimacy in public spaces and gave a generation permission to embrace their inherently flawed natures. Oftentimes, the main characters on SATC were downright unlikeable — and that was refreshing. As a young woman, I often felt trapped by the societal imperative to be endlessly agreeable. The show was cathartic and, in a lot of ways, the first of its kind.
That’s why I wanted to love “And Just Like That…”. I really did. I went in with the highest of hopes. But, as we have seen in the media since the pilot aired on December 9th, 2021, many viewers just like me feel the show dropped the ball and tragically departed from the core elements that made the original so special.
It’s not my intention to lambast the show or pick it apart. I love SJP, Cynthia Nixon, Kristin Davis, Mario Cantone, Sarita Choudhury, Sara Ramirez, Evan Handler and David Eigenberg. I think they are all incredible performers in their own right and it’s clear they brought everything they had into making the re-boot work. I think they were hamstrung by much more foundational gaps in the story and dialogue. I’m not a media critic, but after finishing the series last night, I couldn’t help but wonder…
No, just kidding, I won’t do that.
I was struck by one fatal flaw that really resonated with me as a person and a professional — throughout the course of the 10 episodes, I kept noticing how difficult I would find it, as a member of this group of women, to be vulnerable.
In all honesty, I found Miranda, Charlotte and Carrie to be almost unrecognizable as a friend group. It felt like all their chemistry was gone. As I watched, week after week, I began to notice a lack of psychological safety for main and supporting characters. The show works hard to right some historical wrongs and introduce more representation and diverse storylines. We have to give them kudos for trying. It was nice to see characters from a range of backgrounds and experiences onscreen. But, in my opinion, the show missed the mark when it came to actually feeling inclusive. And it all comes down to one thing —
The characters are never truly able to be vulnerable with one another.
There are a lot of ways we can slice this critique, but I want to call out three specific ways in which I feel the writers did not make room for human frailty in any real way and how it damaged the emotional connection to the characters viewers are supposed to feel.
1/ The Friendship Dynamic of Miranda, Carrie & Charlotte
Sadly, we didn’t see the wonderfully acerbic over-acting of Kim Cattrall as Samantha this season. But the show did an amazing job of placing a Samantha-shaped hologram down over Sarita Choudhury’s Seema (more on this later). So, as viewers we are brought into the story after Samantha has left for the UK and the three remaining women are constantly having to give away the fourth chair at their brunch table to some hipster (presumably).
The change in dynamic is jarring. The women no longer seem connected. If anything, they appear to be slightly exasperated by each other. The dialogue was always pithy and sardonic and the women never had a problem challenging each other but there was always an undercurrent of deep caring and support. I mean, Carrie ran from one end of Manhattan to another on New Year’s Eve at midnight to sit with Miranda because she was lonely. Samantha spoon-fed Carrie breakfast when she was going through a breakup. Miranda pressed pause on her own wedding to hold Sam’s hand when she found out she had breast cancer.
Now, they throw barbs laced with judgement.
There isn’t a single scene in the whole series where the women show genuine support for each other. In the last episode, Miranda callously scolds Carrie, “I thought we were on the same page about all that stuff,” after Carrie shares she feels spiritually connected to her late husband. Carrie and Miranda bully Charlotte and belittle her when she seeks their guidance about her intimate life with her husband. And any time anyone else is getting a little too much airtime with their thoughts and feelings, Carrie basically screams over everyone, “I WIN MY HUSBAND DIED YOU DON’T KNOW PAIN!”
These friendships used to be characterized by the women’s investment in each other’s success. There are moments when it’s clear the show is trying to recapture the essence of the original but ultimately, the women seem so self-interested now, it’s hard to understand why they are even still friends. It bears remarking that, even though this may be a character choice to depict a realistic ‘drift’ in friendships over the years, the women have lost their ability to hold space for each other.
2/ Performative Allyship and Hollow Storytelling
Yes, that is a harsh heading. But, I felt pretty uncomfortable for all the wrong reasons this season as the show tried to introduce diversity into it’s casting and storytelling. I will reiterate, it is good to see strong representation beyond the nearly all-White cast of the original. But, the show’s attempt to integrate these storylines actually ended up dulling any real sense of inclusion or belonging.
For the first five episodes, new characters and storylines are introduced so frequently, I felt like I was getting whiplash. Moreover, beyond having strong representation onscreen, there is nothing that connects the audience to the new characters because the show simply doesn’t have time to do the necessary character development to create space for this connection to happen. So, unfortunately, Seema, Dr. Nya Wallace, Rock and even Che are just foils for the main characters and their storylines are based solely on their differences from the original cast.
Nya Wallace (played beautifully by Karen Pittman) is one of the most devastating examples of this. I was so excited to see where the writers took her character. She’s a powerful presence, a Columbia professor who is experiencing doubt and fear about having a child with her partner. She forms a bond with Miranda after expertly navigating a huge gaffe Miranda makes in her first class. There was so much potential for incredible storytelling here! But, then she kind of disappears. She periodically shows up when Miranda needs some advice on how to be less problematic but for the remainder of the show, she has a handful of scenes where she looks uncomfortable as her partner pressures her into having a baby.
It was so disappointing and a testament to how the show spread itself too thin to engage in meaningful exploration of any of the new storylines, leading to a sense that these characters just don’t really go that deep with each other.
3/ The Role of Women
As I worked my way through the show, I was astounded by how rigid and normative the gender roles have become. SATC challenged notions of monogamy. It laughed in the face of the idea that women need to be married and pregnant by a certain age. The show invited viewers to think differently about the parameters of their romantic relationships and depicted a range of models to be successful in this way.
AJLT does represent well for the LGBTQA+ community, I will give it that. But, there are no relationships that are truly progressive and the women of the show seem to have found themselves back to square one, in a sense.
Charlotte’s character (and I do mean her whole character) is based around her being a mother. She has no identity outside of her two daughters — we don’t learn a single new thing about Charlotte the whole season. We know she gets stressed about her daughter’s Instagram. We learn that she is preoccupied with Harry’s heart health. We understand that she struggles with her other daughter’s exploration of her identity and really would prefer if they just kept to the script and stuck with the pink dresses and ponies. There is one scene where she gets to flaunt some of her art-acumen and no one even acknowledges it!
Miranda is probably the most interesting character, to be fair. But she still leaves her marriage and her life in New York to chase her new love interest to LA (let’s not forget how much Miranda hated LA in SATC). We find her at the beginning of the series completely checked out of her marriage and pursuing a second career in social justice. By the end, she’s a lovestruck teenager who puts her passion on the back burner to move to a place she hates with someone she just met. When her friends show concern for her life choices, she looks deeply uncomfortable and tells them she’s ‘confused.’ What’s confusing is that this former straight-shooter who waited outside Carries apartment in a cab in the pouring rain to apologize and salvage the friendship is now seemingly completely incapable of opening up to her best friends of 30-years and being honest about her loss of purpose and identity.
Carrie’s last scene is the best one — my heart was happy to know we are leaving this character embarking on a new professional chapter and opening herself up to love again. But this ending was unexpected — the thrust of Carrie’s development throughout the series centred upon her navigating her grief at the loss of her partner. At first blush, pretty compelling. Then, we watch episode after episode of her tinker with the idea of a facelift, try to impress a 22-year old Instagram influencer by staying awake super late, trying to find a beeping noise inside her apartment and waffle on if she should start dating. It’s not that Carrie’s storyline is bad. It’s just kind of… non-existent. A series of completely un-self aware moments stitched together in the hope that we won’t notice that Carrie’s tendency toward narcissism has become more of a permanent personality trait.
So, at the beginning of this article, I said that I didn’t mean to lambast the show and I feel like I might have done just that. Much of what I advocate for, in my personal life as well as in my work life, is based on finding power in vulnerability and setting strong boundaries with the people who have influence in our lives. Seeing one of my favourite, formative shows take a nosedive and represent relationships between friends as being devoid of both vulnerability and boundaries just makes me realize that it’s more important that ever to know how and when to open up and when to self-protect.
The thing is, even though I walked away from this re-boot feeling short-changed, if they announced a second season of AJLT tomorrow, I would still watch it. I’m hooked and I’m an optimist, what can I say? I guess they call that unconditional love. How’s that for vulnerability?
