There is a provocative synchronicity to the fact that the “Sex and the City” franchise has come to its conclusion at such a pivotal moment in the life of New York, as a lightning rod mayoral candidate vows to return the city to the working class.
In its long-running fantasia of Manhattan life, even those who served the domestic agendas of the rich managed to live quite enviably. The final season of “And Just Like That …” (which aired its last episode on Thursday night) introduced us, for example, to Adam, Carrie’s landscape architect and deep-in-the-mulch gardener who lives in a rent-stabilized artist’s loft bequeathed to him by his dead hippie mother and the since vaporized generosities of New York City housing policy. Visiting Adam for the first time, Seema, the chauffeured-everywhere real estate mogul who falls for him, is pleased to discover that against all prediction, he lives in a Dwell magazine shoot.
I have been an unabashed fan of the series since the first of its three seasons arrived in 2021, overlooking the St. Pauli Girl costuming and dismissing contradictory strains of criticism. On the one hand, we have been told that the show was overwrought in its realism, shepherding the characters — absent Samantha, though with new additions — through too many fun-sucking challenges and indignities of later middle age. On the other hand came complaints that the story lines were not nearly realistic or relatable enough, given all the money floating around. Older now, the women seemed richer than ever.
And yet there was a transparency to the sequel that the original series refused. A clear through line existed now to Carrie’s checkbook, an understanding of how she funded her extravagances — among them, in this new turn, several floors of a townhouse on Gramercy Park. She was no longer inexplicably acquiring hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of clothes via the irregular earnings of a freelance writing career but rather as the widow of a fantastically wealthy Wall Street guy who willed her just about everything.
That these women lived with money but not for it is surely one of the ways they have endeared themselves to so many for so long. The new series had Miranda, top of her Harvard Law School class, having abandoned a partnership at a white-shoe firm to practice human-rights law. This season she moved into a prettily appointed but still modest apartment — small enough that the dining table is what you see when you walk in the front door.
The finale rolls out over a Thanksgiving set at that table, an event that allows for the desecration of some of the show’s surface perfection. Miranda has invited her son’s pregnant hookup, who brings two ungracious friends committed to their reverse snobberies and not at all remorseful when one of them causes an incident in the bathroom that nearly requires Hazmat suiting.
The holiday also occasions Charlotte’s efforts to fix Carrie up with a thrice-married art collector friend who fails to successfully roast the turkey but who Charlotte stresses “has a plane.” Carrie expresses no interest in it or him.
Over four decades these women have loved, cared for and prioritized one another; they have worked through a thousand chapters of conflict, disappointment, grief and so many other variants of pain. Imagine how this cohort would react to the cattiness, jealousy, judginess, condescension and betrayal that marked the relationship of the trio of friends in the most recent iteration of “The White Lotus,” should they have found themselves at the same hotel.
Ultimately, “And Just Like That …” might distinguish itself as the last sympathetic depiction of rich people we see on television for a long time. Catering to class animosities and in particular, the grievances of the upper middle class toward the yacht-owning, the medium has found a tirelessly successful groove with a churn of series (beyond “The White Lotus” and “Succession,” limited-run escapades like “Sirens,” “The Perfect Couple” and on and on) that bring us to Nantucket or the Upper East Side or the universe of $10,000-a-night resorts only to show us how tone-deaf, self-interested, vengeful and murderously venal the people addicted to luxury are. The implicit message consistently delivered: You are really much better off in your 800 square feet. (Carrie perpetually drawn back to the romance of her single-girl one-bedroom might conceivably agree).
How New York transforms in the coming months and years will undoubtedly be reflected in the culture that turns to it as context. In the 1970s, the city’s fiscal crisis and the social fissures and tensions that accompanied it brought us “All in the Family,” far from Manhattan and deep into Queens with Archie Bunker, the dyspeptic patriarch and loading dock foreman, and a consumerism that would have more or less extended to cold cuts. It is doubtful that we are going back there. But we are probably not headed genially through the revolving door at Bergdorf’s again.
Ginia Bellafante has served as a reporter, critic and, since 2011, as the Big City columnist. She began her career at The Times as a fashion critic, and has also been a television critic. She previously worked at Time magazine.
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