I Didn't Want <em>And Just Like That…</em> but I Didn't Want It to End, Either.
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calc(100vw - 30px)" width="1560">This article contains minor spoilers for the series finale of And Just Like That…
It's the end of the world as we know it, and Miranda Hobbes is attempting to unclog a toilet. I just want us all to sit with that for a moment. As if Cynthia Nixon's Miranda, arguably a feminist icon and one of the best characters ever to appear on television, hadn't been done dirtily enough by And Just Like That… —what with the alcoholism, Karen behavior, and nun deflowering—this moment, as shown in Thursday night's series finale, is how its creators chose to end her arc on this show. For all we know, it's the last we'll ever see of her. And she's on her knees in a bathroom wearing kitchen gloves. (She also gets to reunite with the woman she's dating, while presumably covered in toilet water.) They stopped short of actually showing her in the act of plunging, possibly to preserve what little remains of her dignity, but at this point why bother?
The toilet was clogged, by the way, by a new character named Epcot, a rude friend of the girl that Miranda's son, Brady, accidentally got pregnant. Let's sit with that for a moment, too. Why are we wasting Miranda Hobbes' precious last few moments of existence introducing tertiary characters with upset tummies? It's a final act of shit-stirring, and just another baffling choice from one of the most baffling TV shows in recent memory. Out of nowhere a few weeks ago, it was announced that these last two episodes of AJLT 's third season would actually mark the end of the series, and now here we are, watching a Thanksgiving episode in August and wondering what to make of 33 episodes of this nonsense.
Like many millennials, I started watching Sex and the City way before it was age-appropriate, and it's been a foundational text for me ever since. With most people (or most of the people I interact with, anyway), it feels like the reasons for my admiration go without saying: Obviously it's one of the best shows of all time, point-blank, period. The wit, the style, the portrayal of city life, the insights into dating and sex and friendship—all of these aspects are nearly peerless. A photo of Cynthia Nixon during her gubernatorial run is my phone background screen, and has been for many years.
As much as I loved the original, I'm skeptical about reboots and Hollywood's insistence that our favorite pop culture properties no longer need to end anymore. It used to be good, when things ended. I was dubious about this particular revival when it premiered in 2021, and more so when I realized Samatha wouldn't be involved . (Kim Cattrall had a brief cameo in Season 2 but otherwise didn't appear on AJLT .) But my affection for the original show—and I know I'm not alone here—is such that not watching the sequel series was never an option. So I watched, sometimes with interest, usually with horror.
It was comforting to see Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Miranda, and Charlotte (Kristin Davis) every week, almost amazingly so, but the show was never quite good and was frequently upsettingly bad . The introduction of an emotional support friend of color for each lady in Season 1 was ham-fisted, I was bummed out by what felt to me like some of my favorite characters' personalities being rewritten, and, at the end of the day, I missed Samantha. The real achievement of And Just Like That… may be that it found a way to do the exact opposite of what I wanted at every stage of its life cycle. It first did this by existing at all, of course. I also didn't want Miranda and Steve (David Eigenberg) to break up, or for Aidan (John Corbett) to come back, but both plotlines went roughly right on ahead. If Big (Chris Noth) was going to be dead, fine, but let's see Carrie actually dates some hot men in this new stage of her life. But no, they couldn't give us that, either.
I didn't want any of this, and yet now, nearly four years later, I don't want it to end. It's a strange feeling. The best analogy I can think of is that Michael Patrick King and the writers are like drug dealers: They got me hooked on this slop completely against my will, and isn't it unnecessarily cruel to go to the trouble of getting people addicted to something only to suddenly cut off our supply? Haven't these people ever heard of withdrawal? Get me to the AJLT methadone clinic, stat . Most of the time when a media property of a certain level of popularity ends, it's accompanied by some fanfare—the end of the original Sex and the City certainly was, even if the movies were coming down the pike. This time, though, it might really be the end (emphasis on might , I guess), and we deserved that grieving period for AJLT , facilitated by a courteous—if not distinguished—finale that would let us mourn properly. So, naturally, the show denied us it.
Why did AJLT and the HBO Max powers that be do any of this, from Miranda's poop sendoff to the whole cursed project? Novelist and opinion writer Jennifer Weiner posited this week in the New York Times that the show is a reflection of the rightward turn in politics, and the women are being punished for their former youth and optimism: “Did we tell you that women could be happy, even if they were single; that it was OK to chase success instead of men? Our bad!” It's hard to imagine King and the other writers sitting in a room intent on purposely punishing Carrie and the rest of the women, though to be honest it's hard to imagine how any thought at all could have gone into much of this enterprise. If I had to hazard a guess about how any of this happened, it would center more of the current perverse incentives of Hollywood and streaming, where making a show no one likes based on intellectual property is a better bet than trying to make an original show that can't rest on the laurels of its legacy and a built-in fanbase.
The series' actual final scene, which I hasten to say should not be compared to Sex and the City 's finale, perfect “That's just fabulous” voiceover, wraps up in rather heavy-handed fashion by having Carrie rewrite the epilogue of her novel so that her main character, referred to all season as “the woman,” ends her story single, just like Carrie herself. It's not a tragedy, she insists to her editor, and viewers are supposed to understand this of Carrie as well. And no, being single isn't a tragedy. But can anyone explain why everything else about the show was? It didn't have to be like that, but it just was.
