And Just Like That…
Well. It happened. They all came back. And I watched every cringle-worthy minute of it. But when I heard they were rebooting Sex and the City I couldn’t help but wonder… should they?
Okay, okay, for real though…
Was I OBSESSED with this show when it was on the air? YES. Did I want to move to New York City in large part because of it? YES. Did I want to be a Carrie, but knew I was really a Miranda? YES. Do I have EVERY season on DVD? Absolutely. Did I have my own sex and dating column based on Carrie’s in my college newspaper? I actually did! How many times have I watched the series from start to finish? No idea. Too many times to tell. Did I go see both unwatchable movies in theatres and then again whenever they came on TV? Yup.
I am, what you might call an SATC super-fan.
But then I grew up a little. I actually did move to New York (Brooklyn, where the “ladies” would never deign to go) when I was 23 and lived there (for almost ten years) and came to realize pretty quickly that their New York of exclusive clubs, and expensive shoes, and wildly ridiculous apartments was not going to be my New York. I can confidently say, without hesitation, that mine was far better. It was full of art, and music, and dance, and theatre, and friends, and political talks that lasted long into the night. It was full of poetry, and heartbreak, and protests, and bike rides, and yoga, and reading in the park. And it was full of queerness and immigrant experience, and languages I couldn’t identify (and those I could). It was full of people who looked nothing like me and whose lives I would never know other than what I could glean between subway stops from The Bronx, to Manhattan, to Crown Heights, Brooklyn. That was my New York.
So when I would revisit the show it would always make me smile, but mostly because I knew how silly I had been to think it was real (and I still loved the four women). I started to use what Black feminist theorist, bell hooks termed, the “oppositional gaze” wherein the pleasure of looking (or scopophilia for Freud) is subsumed by the pleasure of interrogating a work of culture for the purposes not of “losing yourself in it,” but rather “looking against the grain” (hooks 1992, 126).
So, seriously, when And Just Like That… was announced I knew that I’d be in front of my TV every Thursday night to watch, and I knew that I most likely had to choose between two ways of watching: turning off my brain and enjoying the pretty pictures (the scopophilic approach) or the analytic, critical approach (the oppositional gaze). When choosing between Freud, another old-dead-white-man who was a misogynist and defined women by our lack of penis; and bell hooks, a world-renowned Black feminist scholar who coined the term “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” I knew what to do. So I did.
SPOILERS AHEAD
…
…
…
…
…
…
…
…
The first episode got something out of the way within the first minute. Covid is over, the pandemic is done, life is “back to normal,” and Samantha (Kim Catrall) had a break-up of sorts with the ladies and is “no longer with them,” and living her best life in London.
With that taken care of up-front the three remaining musketeers sit down to… you guessed it… brunch!
We learn that Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) has a podcast, Charlotte (Kristen Davis) is still a full-time mom who is incredibly busy with her teenagers’ VERY elite private school, and Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) has quit her law firm and is getting a Masters in Human Rights Law so that she can “make a difference.”
We also learn that they’re 55. You guys… they are FIFTY FIVE. In case you didn’t hear… THEY ARE NOW FIFTY FIVE!!! They say it about twenty times in the first episode as if we couldn’t tell that time had passed, and they “deal” with the reality of this through the device of Miranda’s FABULOUS silver hair.
While much of the rest of this post will be about the wildly problematic nature of show I want to point out that as much as the “WE ARE NOW FIFTY FIVE” dialogue irked me, it is fantastic to see women that age on TV. Generally speaking, after 40 (maybe 45 if you’re lucky) women on television are either put out to pasture or cast as old ladies. This is just a friendly reminder that Charlotte, Miranda and Carrie are the same age as Dorothy, Blanche, and Sophia were in THE GOLDEN GIRLS… So… yeah…wow…
Once their age has been firmly established, we meet the woman Charlotte desperately wants to befriend, Lisa Todd Wexley or LTD as Charlotte calls her (Nicole Ari Parker). Wexley is a beautiful and fabulous Black woman whose accessories could kill (maybe literally because some look like they weigh a good ten pounds). Parker’s character becomes the first “Brown-Lady-Guide” of the show. You see, in an effort to acknowledge that the first series included almost ZERO characters of color, each of the well-meaning white women this time around are assigned a woman of color to help them be less awful people.
Am I for inclusion??? Of course! But the ham-fisted way this is handled made me cringe. I didn’t realize how cringey it could get until Miranda meets her “Brown-Lady-Guide,” Dr. Nya Wallace (played by the ever-captivating Karen Pittman). Miranda walks into her first seminar room at Columbia and this happens:
Within this 2 minute and 30 second clip she manages to fuck up royally by making assumptions about: race, gender, sexuality, Black hair, and pronouns… and talks about her own silver hair… again…
And then, within the space of an episode, the pair become fast friends. (Side note: I love my students… they’re fantastic, and I have genuinely become friends with many of them… but you DO NOT GO OUT TO DINNER and become FRIENDS with your students WHILE they are in your class. You do not talk about your sex life, or fertility issues with your students WHILE they are students. “Hello, Title IX office, I’d like to report an inappropriate relationship that creates an uncomfortable situation in the classroom!”)
But with that, Miranda gets her “Brown-Lady-Guide.”
It takes Carrie a bit longer to meet hers. In the final moments of the first episode Mr. Big (Chris Noth who is currently under-fire regarding accusations of sexual assault and predatory behavior with female New York University students) has a heart-attack after a Peloton ride and dies. Carrie sees him collapsed next to the shower and runs to him and holds him as he takes his last breaths.
It would have been moving if I hadn’t been screaming in my head… “WTF?! GIVE THAT MAN CPR!!! CALL 911!!! WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK ARE YOU DOING CARRIE?!?!?!?!” But that’s beside the point.
Mr. Big dies and Carrie needs to sell their FABULOUS apartment. Enter Realtor, Seema Patel (Sarita Choudhury- whom I love) who, in the time it takes Carrie to find a place, hate it, sell it, and end up back in the studio apartment we remember from once-upon-a-time, becomes her new best friend and official “Brown-Lady-Guide.”
Seema (Choudhury) is arguably my favorite character in the show (actually, can she have her own show please! That I would love to see!) Like most of the “Brown-Lady-Guides” her character is not particularly well-written or fully fleshed out. We get bits and pieces of the stories of the Brown-Lady-Guides over time. We learn that LTD (Parker) has an overbearing mother-in-law, but Charlotte’s art knowledge saves her from an aggressive dinner-party attack. We learn that Nya (Pittman) and her husband can’t get pregnant and Nya is okay with it… her husband Andre (LeRoy McClain) is not, but Miranda provides a shoulder to learn on.
We learn that Seema is 53 and never married and her parents make her feel awful about it, but at a Diwali celebration Carrie comes to her defense. (Side note: they go to a Sari Shop to get outfits for the Diwali celebration… and there isn’t a SINGLE SARI in that store! One of my dearest friends, whom I lived with in Brooklyn for a few years is from India and I went to her wedding in India and I can tell you that what Carrie and Seema were looking at, what they wore were NOT sarees. They were lehengas. A “Brown-Lady-Guide” should have known the difference).
Getting back to the point at hand, if you’re seeing a bit of a white savior thing going on here… you aren’t wrong. I did too. Nya (Pittman) even calls Miranda out on her White Savior complex when Nya cannot find her faculty ID to get into a building on campus and Miranda goes all… Rambo. And yeah, we’ll get to the Rambo thing as well.
It isn’t that the white women have friends of color that’s a problem; it’s that LTD (Parker), Nya (Pittman), and Seema (Choudhury) are so clearly there to tell the audience “we know we forgot that non-white people lived in New York last time around, SO WE ARE CORRECTING IT.” And honestly, having lived in New York, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if Charlotte, an Episcopalian-turned-Jew who lives on the Upper East Side might not have any Black friends. Because New York City is incredibly diverse... as a city, but neighborhoods aren’t. They’re very segregated and ignoring that is also a problem.
But by the end of the first two episodes everyone has their “Brown-Lady-Guide” and so the writers can move on to correcting the straightness of the original show. This too was done in a ham-fisted kind of way, especially for a show that more or less imagined straight white womanhood from the point of view of white gay men (show-runners Darren Starr and Michael Patrick King).
We begin with meeting Che (Sara Ramirez) the host of Carrie’s podcast, “X, Y, and Me.” Che (they/them) is a queer and non-binary stand-up comic… who isn’t actually all that funny and whose podcast features a “Woke-Alert” button which is engaged at random intervals during the show. Naturally, there is a discussion of pronoun usage, how problematic the gender binary is, and once again… how clueless Carrie seems to be about it all in the beginning.
When Che and Miranda meet it is at Big’s funeral and Che offers Miranda and Steve’s son, Brady (Niall Cunningham), some weed. Miranda goes all “Rambo” on Che (Che’s words, not mine) and I kept asking myself, “What the hell happened to Miranda?!” She was always the most sensible, the most grounded, the most realistic of the four, and to see her losing her shit because her seventeen-year-old son takes a puff of weed was bizarre. Later on Che and Miranda have a meeting of the minds and Che shotguns Miranda and then Miranda appears to “discover” weed(?) and also discover that Che is kinda hot.
Before we know it, Miranda is cheating on Steve (poor, sweet Steve) (David Eigenberg) with Che and eventually leaves him for them. While I was always on team Steve, I understood how Miranda felt. Their marriage was one of comfort and convenience. They ate ice cream on the couch at night and that was it. No spark, no sex for three years, and no adventure. Che (Ramirez) presents Miranda with a chance to be a new person and explore her own boundaries and queerness, something that the previously straight and straight-laced Miranda would never have done.
All that having been said, the uptight, borderline hysterical Miranda of And Just Like That… was still there. In the comment about attending Che’s “comedy concert,” (WTAF is that? Has anyone ever actually said that?!), in her panic over Che’s lag time in an Instagram DM conversation, in her use of the word “girlfriend” in a later episode, and of course in her choice to leave New York to follow Che to LA for pilot season.
Meanwhile, Charlotte and Harry (Evan Handler) have their hands full with some queerness as well. Their second daughter, Rose (Alexa Swinton), tells Charlotte that she wants to cut her hair short… to change the pink in her room… to be called “Rock,” and finally, to go by “they/ them” pronouns. As a parent myself, I understand that this can be hard for parents. The child you always thought you knew tells you that they’re not what you thought, and that can take some getting used to. And that’s fine. But Charlotte and Harry seem perplexed by the whole notion of Rock’s queerness.
There are multiple references to not understanding how someone isn’t either a “boy” or a “girl,” confusion about pronouns, and utter anger when they meet with Rock’s teachers who tell them that Rock has been “Rock” at school for a while and that it isn’t “just a phase.”
Eventually Charlotte and Harry embrace their child for who they are and even go so far as to change Rock’s Bat Mitzvah into a They-Mitzvah, and that’s just how it should be BUT what boggled my mind is why these people were so confused!
It’s almost as if the first series ended (followed by two unwatchable films) and just like that… they woke up twenty years later and had learned NOTHING.
Of course there is an adjustment to understanding queer and non-binary identities. Of course there is an adjustment to understanding and identifying one’s role in the white supremacist, cis-hetero, capitalist, patriarchy. Of course there is an adjustment to our ongoing understandings of systematic and institutional oppression… but those adjustments, those lessons, those evolutions have been happening for most of us for the last twenty years. Day by day, a little at a time, (I hope) we (privileged white people) are getting a little less racist. A little less queer-phobic. A little less blind to our own privilege.
Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte seem to have been frozen in time for twenty years, plopped into 2022 and then forced to reckon with twenty years of conversations about race, gender, sexuality, and privilege for which they are completely unprepared. While I commend the writers for including queer characters and characters of color in the series, those characters are still there to serve the development of the central white characters—to make Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte better people. Which, in 2022 isn’t really progress at all.
Moreover, beating your audience over the head and proverbially screaming, “LOOK! WE ARE WOKE NOW!” isn’t exactly a subtle way to correct or address the complete lack of wokeness from the 1990s and early 2000s.
Was the show cringe-worthy at least once per episode? Yes. Were the characters over-the-top and almost caricatures of their former selves? Uh-huh. Did I roll my eyes… a lot? Yep. Are Charlotte, Miranda, and Carrie still clueless? Yeah… Am I looking forward to next season? YOU BET I AM!
And just like that… they got me hooked… again.
