And Just Like That….It's Over

This article contains spoilers about last night’s series finale of And Just Like That

And just like that we’ve bid farewell to Carrie Bradshaw and company. Last night’s season three finale of And Just Like That doubled as the series finale after showrunner and executive producer Michael Patrick King announced a couple weeks ago that the show, an extension of the Sex and the City multiverse, would not be going forward with additional seasons. MPK maintained it was his decision to end the show but all signs have since pointed to it having been cancelled by HBO Max. Hours after MPK made the announcement, Sarah Jessica Parker posted an emotional tribute on her Instagram page, a love letter or eulogy if you will, to Carrie Bradshaw, a character she says, “has dominated my professional heartbeat for 27 years.” Whether we’ll ever see Carrie and friends again in any kind of future iteration remains to be seen but all signs currently point to no, that this is truly the end of an era.

Last night’s And Just Like That finale saw Miranda paired off with Joy, Seema taking things to the next level with Adam, and married couples Harry and Charlotte and Lisa and Herbert continuing their happy unions after a few bumps in the road. As for Carrie, after a disastrous attempt at a reunion with Aidan, a flirtation and one night stand with her downstairs neighbour Duncan, our protagonist was, as the epilogue of her latest book reads, not alone, but on her own. New York’s seminal gal about town is, once again, single and fabulous – you can decide for yourselves whether to punctuate that with an exclamation point or a question mark. Frankly, a single Carrie is how the original Sex and the City series should have concluded back in 2004, with Carrie choosing not The Russian, not Big, but herself.

And Just Like That….It’s Over

And Just Like That has been a lightning rod for criticism and mixed reviews since it first premiered in 2021. Even after the second Sex And The City film in 2010 was widely panned by audiences and critics alike (although none as savagely as the review by the indomitable and incisive Lindy West) fans of the original series were still eagerly anticipating this new series – a true testament to both the legacy of the original source material and the multi-dimensional characters created by SJP, Cynthia Nixon, and Kristin Davis. Kim Cattrall, save for a very brief cameo in the AJLT season two finale, famously passed on the reboot – a move that would ultimately prove to be the right one.

There’s no other way to say it: And Just Like That was…not good. The first two seasons weren’t without valid criticism, truly ridiculous plot points and insufferable new characters (looking at you, Che Diaz) but a few episodes of this third season, viewers, mostly fans of the original series, were unequivocally and unabashedly hate-watching AJLT. The general sentiment online seemed to be “my God this show is so terrible, give me ten more seasons.” We simply loved hating this show. Our relationship with AJLT was more toxic than any of the situationships on SATC. No matter how bad the show got (and it did get very, very bad) viewers just could not stop watching. If this were Brokeback Mountain, we were all Jack Twist and the show was our Ennis Del Mar – we wish we knew how to quit it. But alas, we remained enraptured by this bastardized new version of an old show we still hold so dear, more than 20 years after it ended. And then AJLT quit us. And weirdly, we were all devastated. Again, the online sentiment was, “I hated this show, I’m going to miss it so much.”

And Just Like That squandered a real opportunity to tell interesting stories about women in their mid-50s. Instead it gave us a screeching, bug eyed Charlotte falling all over the place, Harry pissing himself, a lobotomized husk of her former self Miranda, and side characters for side characters and a twice dead Dad we barely cared about any way. It was riddled with plot points that went absolutely nowhere (Charlotte’s vertigo and Carrie inhaling Scarface levels of TUMS are just two examples) and precious screen time was devoted to the most inconsequential things like deodorant preferences and ordering a table online. One of the biggest crimes of this third season was the many, many episodes the show wasted shoving Aidan down our collective throats when it was obvious from the jump he and Carrie were horribly mismatched. One look at Aidan’s future school shooter son should have had Carrie jumping out of that broken window in Virginia and high tailing it back to New York to reclaim her peace.

And Just Like That….It’s Over

Another bizarre choice was the complete and total erasure of Big. Understandable that the writers would want to distance the show from Chris Noth after abuse allegations surfaced in season one of AJLT but to have Carrie act like Big never existed and calling him a “big misteake” was a wild choice and completely invalidated so much of the original series. We watched this woman chase this man for six seasons and two movies and despite their extreme toxicity, they were marketed to us as soulmates and “end game” and now you’re having Carrie tell us with her whole chest that she and Aidan have been together for 20+ years? When, if you added up their time together it was probably closer to two years total and in between their second and third attempts at a relationship both were married to whole other people and Aidan had three whole human children with someone else? It’s not even like they were in touch all these years – save for a chance encounter in Abu Dhabi, they were essentially no contact. The math was simply not mathing and Carrie never got called out on the massive revisionist history she was so confidently peddling.

Maybe no one challenged Carrie this season on her questionable math because she was absolutely miserable in nearly every episode. In almost every scene it seemed like both Carrie, and Sarah Jessica Parker, would rather be literally anywhere else in the world. In one episode Carrie, a renowned shopaholic, is tasked with taking her best friend’s husband shopping for jeans and she looks like she’s being dragged off to a Gulag. Her other best friend, an inexplicably homeless Miranda, comes to stay in her palatial townhouse for a few days and Carrie is biting her head off about the last banana, yogurt, and Mexican Coke. And that was mild compared to the way she treated Miranda during and after Charlotte’s karaoke birthday party. At one point you had to ask yourself if these women even liked each other anymore. Miranda, the once outspoken pragmatist of SATC, would have pushed back at Carrie. Lobotomized AJLT Miranda sat there and took it. Even in her scenes with Aidan Carrie appeared mostly joyless and morose. The spark and vivaciousness she once had was simply not there. Perhaps if the show still featured Carrie’s voice overs we could have some more insight into her psyche – was she erasing Big because she was still in deep grief after his death? Was she snapping at Miranda because deep down she knew things wouldn’t work out with Aidan but she was too scared to be alone? We’ll never know. Instead we were saddled with Carrie droning on about “The Woman” as she wrote her truly terrible piece of historical fiction that we were supposed to believe was actually good. As Judge Judy once said, don’t piss down my leg and tell me it’s raining. In no way was this book good and when downstairs neighbour Duncan, a curmudgeonly celebrated author of historical biographies, proclaimed that it stopped him dead in his tracks? The suspension of disbelief required by the viewers was monumental.

A big part of the magic of SATC was the palpable chemistry between the four female leads. Just them sitting at a table in a coffee shop was enough to hold our attention. There weren’t nearly enough scenes of the remaining three women together, having real conversations about real things. We never got to see Carrie tell her friends that she and Aidan didn’t work out. Written properly, that could have been emotional, compelling and relatable. But sure, let’s give that screentime to a creepy masturbating elderly puppeteer instead. In last night’s series finale Carrie tried to have an honest conversation with Charlotte about the possibility of ending up alone and instead of a realistic, vulnerable conversation between two longtime friends, we just got Charlotte assuring Carrie that everything will work out and she will eventually find a man. Although maybe this is because Kristin Davis has seemingly lost any and all ability to act and unless it involves a wide eyed scream or falling down, it’s no longer in her wheelhouse.

And Just Like That….It’s Over

Nothing about AJLT made being a woman in her 50s look at all aspirational or like something to look forward to. And the extreme wealth of so many of the characters (save for homeless Miranda) made it difficult to identify with them or root for them. The stakes were just so low that many of us didn’t really care about any of their “problems” with the possible exception of Harry’s cancer. Who cares about Charlotte’s dog getting “cancelled” or her trying to get Lily into a prestigious college unless it involves jail time like the Lori Loughlin Varsity Blues scandal?

With so few shows getting produced starring mature women, And Just Like could have created content and stories about women in their 50s that was just as groundbreaking as Sex and the City was about women in their 30s. Instead, the only thing it broke were the hearts of diehard fans of the original. It was such a frustrating watch. Maybe we all weren’t hate watching so much as we were hope watching – tuning in every week to see if somehow the writers finally pulled it together to give us the show we all deserved – only to have said hopes inevitably dashed before the opening title card. At least we’ll always have The Golden Girls, a show full of heart and humour that tackled real stories and real issues of women at this stage of their lives that still holds up today more than three decades later. In the penultimate episode of And Just Like That, after seeing how Lisette has committed a hate crime against her iconic old apartment, Carrie comes to the conclusion that you really can’t go home again. Perhaps the creators of AJLT should have heeded that same advice and left well enough alone.