After three seasons which never really worked and had no shortage of detractors to pick the many nits, And Just Like That has vanished into the wealthy ether of New York.
When news arrived that the taxing Sex and the City revival would not be renewed, were you sad? The show has been dogged by deranged plots, unhinged writing and characters that seem to have forgotten who they were in the original iteration of the show.
When the reboot first arrived in 2021, staunch fans with long-held affiliations to any one of the four women found it tough to bear witness to. And Just Like That put its self-flagellation foot first and arrived in a privileged cloud of white liberal guilt.
Everyone on screen was obscenely wealthy, robbing stakes. Plots endlessly, and annoyingly, incorporated the kids. Che Diaz kept reminding us that this show now featured a ‘woke moment’ button.
The once carefully-plotted Sex and the City had returned as an entity that killed off the same character (Lisa Todd Wexley’s father) twice. The creatives either couldn’t be bothered to keep tabs on what had already happened or just thought we were all too brainless to notice. I don’t know which is worse.
All that being said, with the final episode of And Just Like That, we finally arrived at a point that does something revolutionary – and almost makes you wish it wasn’t all over.
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Was the finale good? Of course not. It’s still And Just Like That. So we, naturally, had to have the episode’s dramatic climax be a turd-ridden toilet overflowing.
Meanwhile, a multitude of storylines were abandoned to the winds of what-could-have-been. There was no Lisa affair. No Harry death. No Brady love child. Plots were teased and hinted at only to disappear off with Duncan to who-knows-where. (Well, London, in what I’m imagining could be another, better show where he meets Samantha.)
But what And Just Like That should be applauded for is its final note, which leaves Carrie content and – pause for dramatic effect – alone. It was something Sex and the City was never brave enough to do.
The last we saw of Carrie, before the two films and three seasons of And Just Like That, she was walking down a crowded New York street on the phone to Mr Big (or John James Preston, as we finally learned).
Yet the show’s creator Darren Star never wanted her to end up in a relationship. After season three, he moved on to a consultant role and has been pretty frank in sharing his gripes about how things wrapped up.
‘Shows evolve and Carrie certainly evolved, but I always felt the show was never about a woman getting her man. That’s a traditional romantic comedy,’ he told Vulture last year. ‘It was about how women can define themselves 100 percent, that they didn’t have to be defined by marriage.’
Yes, women can find the right partner and happily settle down. But Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and (sometimes) Charlotte were haphazard, experimental and fiercely independent. That made the show radically modern at the time, only for it to settle with conventional romance at the end.
Take the (genius) episode They Shoot Single People, Don’t They? which revolves around the ‘hostile’ question mark placed at the end of Carrie’s ‘Single and Fabulous’ magazine cover.
It was a microcosm for the entire premise of the show: a probing question in to whether a woman can indeed be without a permanent partner and still thrive, with best friends as her real loves.
Did you like the And Just Like That ending?
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Yes
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No
The show’s finale said no, but And Just Like That says yes. Admittedly, the last episode – appropriately titled Party of One – plumbs Carrie’s neuroses about her sudden singledom. With Aidan’s odd baby talk back in Virginia and Duncan having packed up his performative pipe for Blighty, she has no option but to ask whether she can be happy by herself.
The final scene – a gorgeous homage to the Sex and the City title credits –sees her dance around her ludicrously large townhouse in a hot pink tutu, scooping up maybe the most adorable cat on TV, as a happy, fabulous, single woman. No question mark!
If only And Just Like That had started here. It’s unclear whether this was always intended as the series finale (would they really have wanted to go out on such a faecally-focused note?) but in many ways, it’s the ending we should have had all along.
And Just Like That is available on Sky and streaming service NOW.
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