There is nothing that will make me fall out of love with the marvelous maelstrom of exasperating nonsense that is the Sex and the City prequel series And Just Like That.
Not the ludicrous ways in which the show has betrayed the Miranda character. Not being forced to watch Brady Hobbes have sex. Not even Che Diaz. Season 3, which just launched on Max, introduces Rosie O’Donnell as a virgin lesbian nun who has sex for the first time with Miranda. Not. Even. That.
It’s either Stockholm syndrome or I’ve become a nostalgia-motivated storm chaser, because I’ve come to love and cherish this show, while so many other people I know continue to tune in as a hate watch, or a sense of obligation born out of 27 years spent with these women. I guess I’m a Carrie Bradshaw-obsessed weather girl now, and, after screening several episodes of the new season, I can tell you that the forecast is for much more mess. And thank god—and Manolo Blahnik—for that.
Watching #AndJustLikeThat Roommate: I thought you hated this show. Why do you keep watching it?Me: pic.twitter.com/GFlmidruiV
— Lee (@caseyleemoore) May 30, 2025
Carrie is still in the weird holding pattern with Aidan (John Corbett), waiting for him to finish raising his sons before they can go back to living together again. She’s sending him postcards and having occasional (awkward and bad) phone sex while distracting herself by decorating her massive Gramercy Park apartment.
And Just Like That seems to be exchanging Sex and the City’s fashion porn with real estate porn. The brownstone is so big that running from her closet upstairs to the kitchen door when its security alarm goes off requires a track-and-field Olympian’s training.
Like the furniture she’s waiting for to fill her apartment, she tells Charlotte (Kristin Davis) and Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), “It’s like my relationship is on back order.” Their response—“For five years?!—is classic Sex and the City: a labored, cutesy metaphor that makes you chuckle at its corniness, exposing a character’s wild delusion while still making it seem precocious.
In fact, much of these first few episodes have the patter of a classic SATC episode, more so than previous seasons of AJLT.
The girls think someone is checking out Miranda at the bar, but it turns out the woman used to be Brady’s babysitter and wanted to say hi. It triggers one of those iconic Miranda Hobbes humiliation spirals, where she word-vomits all the updates on her life: her divorce, her moving out of the Brooklyn brownstone, her sobriety, her recent realization that she’s queer. “Elephant in the room: I’m a lesbian now!”
Accidentally sleeping with a virgin who also happens to be a nun on some sort of Catholic rumspringa in New York—and who then becomes obsessed with her—is quintessential SATC dating hijinks.
Charlotte’s efforts to evolve and be “woke” for the sake of her kids is tinged with enough “give me a break with this, already!” self-awareness to let fans know that the Charlotte York we knew and loved is still in there.
AJLT has stopped all pretense and essentially has made Seema (Sarita Choudhury) the official Samantha replacement in the foursome. The character’s fabulousness and confidence this season is tinged with more zaniness, the kinds of kooky indignities that Samantha would often endure in the pursuit of manifesting her perfect, glamorous, sexually satisfying life.
And Nicole Ari Parker’s Lisa as Charlotte’s two-peas-in-a-pod bosom buddy has made Charlotte’s AJLT arc much more believable: Carrie and Miranda are so close, it makes sense that Charlotte would need her own confidant who understands her lifestyle.
For all the ways AJLT is cringe-inducing, I find it endearing. The series is forced to retrofit the tone and the content from a series made in the early 2000s about women dating in their thirties onto a new show meeting them at a point nearly three decades later, made in an entirely different television landscape. Of course that was going to be awkward, especially when fans’ expectations stress the endeavor.
But when the show works, it’s because it nails the exploration about what happens to our relationships with our friends, our lovers, and ourselves as we get older. It’s prickly and sometimes confronts our expectations about what a show in the SATC-universe would tackle. (Our lithe fashion plate Carrie Bradshaw needed hip surgery?!?) I think that’s why it makes some fans uncomfortable. It’s why I’ve come to really enjoy it.
The older I get, the more I feel like and truly understand Carrie Bradshaw, in that I become more and more insufferable and narcissistic, yet still expect everyone to find me absolutely adorable. The one thing I can’t reconcile, however, is her wearing of high fashion on a casual afternoon in her own home.
If it was appropriate to remove my outside clothes (hard pants) and put on my inside clothes (soft pants) in the apartment hallway at my front door before I walk in, I would. That is how immediate I need to make a change.
This woman is skipping around her apartment writing postcards to her a–hole boyfriend in a ballgown. Cannot relate. And that’s the whole appeal of this show.
Every line of dialogue, from the series through the movies and, now, And Just Like That rings true to me, like Charlotte York is setting up a perfectly appointed luncheon inside of my heart. And yet not one bit of these women’s lives is representative of how I have lived in and navigated New York City over the last 20 years. And Just Like That is about how out of touch these women are because they are just so unbelievably wealthy as it is about exploring their friendships and love lives.
They are me. They are aliens. And that’s why I love them.
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