Can ‘And Just Like That…’ Actually Stick the Landing?

Last week, the world stopped turning for just a moment when And Just Like That… creator Michael Patrick King announced that his Sex and the City revival series, which followed best friends Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), and Charlotte (Kristin Davis) into their 50s, would officially come to an end after three deliciously daffy and wonderfully wonky seasons.

Although many SATC fans criticized And Just Like That… for being tonally inconsistent, rife with continuity errors, and, well, “bad,” the news still sent shock waves through the community. Even the harshest And Just Like That critics couldn’t help but mourn its ending, with many expressing their complicated feelings as Carrie Bradshaw would: in the form of self-centered writing. “Do I hate-watch this every single week? Yes. Am I absolutely devastated it’s been canceled? Also yes,” read one viral tweet. If this doesn’t make sense to you, then, to quote an enduring meme of Carrie from Sex and the City 2, “You just don’t get it.”

The end of And Just Like… also means the end of Carrie Bradshaw—at least until a third revival series called I Couldn’t Help But Wonder that’s set in a Manhattan nursing home hits HBO in 20 years. “Carrie Bradshaw is the most important character that has ever graced television, and arguably, she is up there with the likes of Odysseus, Hamlet, and even Jesus,” read another viral tweet. While that might be slightly hyperbolic, Carrie has an enduring cultural significance—whether she’s strutting across the street in her Manolo Blahniks, smoking a ciggy, or simply sitting at her laptop. Parker took to Instagram to post a truly moving tribute to the character: “Carrie Bradshaw has dominated my professional heartbeat for 27 years,” wrote Parker. “I think I have loved her most of all.”

It’s never easy to say goodbye to the characters we love. But if the penultimate episode of And Just Like That… is any indication, the revival series might just be sending Carrie off into the sunset the way it always should have: by having her end up single and fabulous, exclamation point.

The original Sex and the City came to a close with a two-part finale. Carrie had moved to Paris with her newest paramour, Alexander “the Russian” Petrovsky (Mikhail Baryshnikov), leaving behind New York City, Big (Chris Noth), and, most notably, her three best girlfriends. Over the course of “An American Girl in Paris,” Carrie grows lonely and despondent; her relationship with the Russian fractures (he accidentally hits her!); and Carrie loses herself (symbolized by her misplacing her signature “Carrie” nameplate necklace.) After Miranda instructs Big to “go get our girl,” the one true love of Carrie’s life arrives in France, sweeps Carrie off her feet, and whisks her back to New York, where they go on to live happily ever after. At least, until he rides a Peloton in the season premiere of And Just Like That….

Carrie and Big winding up together was not necessarily a foregone conclusion. Sex and the City allegedly shot three alternate endings to the series; all three take place at the coffee shop where Carrie and her girls like to gather. In one version, Carrie gets engaged to the Russian and asks her best friends to be maids of honor in their shotgun wedding. In another, she tells her friends that Big is moving back from the Napa Valley to be with her. And in the last, most depressing version, Carrie ends things with the Russian, only for Big to show up in Paris and dump her for good (perhaps foreshadowing his cold feet in the Sex and the City movie).

“Men. Fuck ’em, fuck all of them,” says Samantha. “That’s coming from a woman who has,” quips Miranda.

That version perhaps would have been the most realistic one. Yet ultimately, the series opted to give Carrie a fairy-tale ending instead. Even at the time, some viewers were perturbed by a character as complex and independent as Carrie Bradshaw ending up with a problematic man. It didn’t help that all of her friends, including the notoriously promiscuous and relationship-phobic Samantha (Kim Cattrall), also concluded the series in committed, monogamous relationships. For a show devoted to unpacking the nuances and pitfalls of heterosexual dating, as well as the enduring power of female friendship, Carrie getting her Cinderella story just didn’t feel in the spirit of its original intent.

Sex and the City creator Darren Starr, who stepped away from his showrunning duties on the show after season three, apparently felt the same way. “I think the show ultimately betrayed what it was about, which was that women don’t ultimately find happiness from marriage,” he said in a 2016 interview. “Not that they can’t. But the show initially was going off script from the romantic comedies that had come before it. That’s what had made women so attached.”

Candace Bushnell, whose book served as the basis for Sex and the City, shared Starr’s sentiment. “I think, in real life, Carrie and Big wouldn’t have ended up together. But at that point the TV show had become so big,” she said in an interview with The Guardian in 2017. “When people are making a TV show, it’s show business, not show art, so at that point it was for the audience and we weren’t thinking about what the impact would be 10 years later.”

Of course, Parker stood by the decision to have Big and Carrie end up together at the time. “I don’t think of it as someone diminishing herself by letting a man marry her,” she said in 2016 Yahoo interview. “It always felt that she had arrived at that on her own.”

Now, two decades later, Parker and King have another shot at wrapping up Carrie Bradshaw’s story. Like its predecessor, And Just Like That… is having a two-part series finale—and part one indicates that time has maybe allowed the team to reconsider that previous ending. In the first episode, “Forgot About the Boy,” the newly single Carrie has finished a draft of her historical novel. But her publisher is concerned about the ending, calling the book a “romantic tragedy,” because the central woman ends up alone.

“In 1846 a woman ending up alone would be tragic. But I’m starting to get the sense that people—well, more specifically, my publishing house, think the same thing,” Carrie says to Miranda and Charlotte over drinks. Carrie tells her friends that they want her to add an epilogue that will make the whole thing more upbeat—but she demurs. “I like the ending,” she says. “I find it honest.”

While this might be wishful thinking, it certainly feels as though King and Carrie are playfully winking at their audience, hinting that they remember the criticism lobbed at the Sex and the City finale. And perhaps, after a few decades, they’ve come around to agreeing with it. Of course, there’s an obstacle in the way: Carrie recently had a one-night stand with her downstairs neighbor, a fellow writer and handsome Brit named Duncan (Jonathan Cake). As of this episode, he hasn’t opted to renew his lease, and he’s returning to London, potentially leaving Carrie alone in her big, empty house.

But as much as some viewers might want Carrie to have a happy ending, I implore And Just Like That… not to make the same mistake twice. Do not choose the easy route and pair up Carrie with a nice British man we hardly know. Take the road less traveled: Let Carrie wind up alone.

With next week’s And Just Like That… finale, King and Parker have the opportunity to right an ancient wrong. If they allow Carrie to wind up single, we can forgive them for resurrecting Aidan Shaw, killing Lisa Todd Wexley’s father twice, and the comedic stylings of Che Diaz. A fulfilled Carrie, in her early sixties, surrounded by her girlfriends, would make the entire experiment of a series—for all its missteps—a worthwhile endeavor.

Or if not, they can just bring Samantha back. That would work too.