The last season of And Just Like That, Michael Patrick King’s alternately goofy and graceful continuation of the Sex and the City universe, ended with our plucky heroine Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) on a sunny beach in Greece, contemplating a five-year deferment of her relationship with the second love of her life, Aidan (John Corbett). What adventures might await her during that pause?
As it turns out, that gap isn’t so gappy. In season three of And Just Like That, premiering on HBO Max (and emphatically not on regular HBO) May 29, Carrie and Aidan are still very much in contact. He pops in for a visit or two; they have awkward (and off-putting) phone sex. And, true to Carrie’s only sometimes lovable solipsism, she talks about him nonstop. Much of the first six episodes of AJLT this season is devoted to the question of Aidan; too much, I daresay. The show introduces some interesting new facets of Aidan’s character, particularly pertaining to his questionable parenting style. Yet it leaves those issues mostly unexplored, trusting that we’re more invested in the push-pull of his and Carrie’s long-distance situationship. But what we really want—or what I really want, anyway—is to see Carrie free.
Which was always true of Sex and the City, to some extent. Though we swooned and shuddered at various season-long romantic entanglements, there was always a trust that Carrie would break away eventually, once again becoming the searching singleton we first fell in love with. And Just Like That is a different kind of show, more serial soap than episodic exploration of the vagaries of sex and dating. Drawn-out narratives are to be expected. But Carrie, still so shrewdly played by Parker, would benefit from more dynamic stories.
We get there, almost, by mid-season, when a new romantic possibility emerges and AJLT takes on the familiar old timbre of discovery. It’s not just potential attraction that peps things up; we also get a whole plot line about how one friend (Carrie) relates to another (Miranda), something AJLT—which mostly has its girls atomized in their own ecosystems—rarely does. One would think that the writers would rely more heavily on the well established chemistry between Parker, Cynthia Nixon, and Kristin Davis, but they’ve mostly got the characters too busy to see one another.
Miranda is navigating life as a divorced, newly out lesbian in her 50s, meaning Nixon must again endure a series of indignities that the show would never inflict on anyone else. But Miranda’s trajectory does level out; a steady flame emerges, and it’s nice to see Miranda striding a bit more confidently through the show
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