“Will not having sex mean that we aren’t Harry and Charlotte?” Charlotte York-Goldenblatt, played by Kristen Davis, asks her husband Harry Goldenblatt (Evan Handler) in an early episode of what we now know is the final season of the much-maligned and utterly addictive Sex and the City reboot, And Just Like That. During Season 3, Harry had been experiencing penile symptoms such as erectile dysfunction and incontinence, which prompted him to go to the doctor, who diagnosed him with prostate cancer. The side effects of his treatment could include both long-term bowel dysfunction and erectile dysfunction. The latter would have been an ideal opportunity for the show to explore what a diminished sex life might mean for the couple. After all, regular penetrative sex was so important to Charlotte that she left her first husband, Trey (Kyle MacLachlan), over his inability to get it up and his disinterest in addressing it. Has Charlotte’s opinion on the issue changed in the ensuing 25 years, during which time she has built a life and a family with Harry?
It seemed like this was the narrative arc Charlotte would face this season, but that would have required And Just Like That to be concerned with character development, storyline continuity, and any interest in the real lives of menopausal women. “My husband had cancer and I wasn’t allowed to say anything about it,” she lamented to an energy healer in a recent episode, which the show took as a topic sentence and ran with. Instead of this very real dilemma, we got Charlotte experiencing—checks notes—inexplicable vertigo and a “loud and totally unnecessary renovation.”
This cowardly avoidance has been one of many problems with And Just Like That since it premiered on (the newly re-minted) HBO Max in late 2021. The original show from which it spun off broke ground in the late 1990s for speaking frankly about the sex lives of thirty-something women—everything from threesomes to anal to abortion. The outsized success of the franchise meant that, by the end of the TV series and its two spin-off movies, its focus had shifted more in the direction of status signalling in Versace ballgowns, Park Avenue penthouses, and first-class flights. Fans of the show who had aged alongside its heroes Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon), and Charlotte were excited to see how the trio would tackle sex in later life. (Kim Cattrall, who played the most sexually adventurous character, Samantha Jones, didn’t return for And Just Like That, though she did appear in a brief cameo in last season’s finale.)
The first two seasons did offer up some interesting developments in the lives of these women, like Charlotte’s breakthrough bleeding disrupting her belief that she was finally in menopause or new character Lisa Todd-Wexley’s (Nicole Ari Parker) accidental pregnancy in her 40s. And Miranda coming out as queer opened up a whole new world of sexual exploration for the character. But And Just Like That was mostly a missed opportunity to delve into any of these topics for more than a passing mention, with much of the connective tissue seeming to take place in between episodes, as with Harry casually dropping in the penultimate episode that he still hasn’t been able to get an erection months after his surgery, which Charlotte breezily shrugs off.
So much of what transpires happens to these women instead of enabling them to be the drivers of their own stories. We’re more privy to Harry’s bodily functions than anything having to do with Charlotte, who hasn’t done anything of consequence since her decision to go back to work last season, a callback to the original show. Lisa has a convenient-for-plot’s-sake miscarriage instead of meaningfully discussing the realities of abortion for an older Black woman. Grief over losing her father for the second time and her husband Herbert (Christopher Jackson) pushing her away after his city council election loss could have driven Lisa into the arms of her hot co-worker, but that storyline seems to have been forgotten. Miranda’s adult son Brady (Niall Cunningham) got someone pregnant, so now Miranda’s going to be a grandma when she barely wanted to be a mother. And for some reason, most of this season was about Carrie’s (thankfully!) ex Aidan’s (John Corbett) teenage son Wyatt.
Don’t even get me started on the criminally underused Sarita Choudhury as Seema, Carrie’s intriguing new friend who chided Carrie for pitying her life-long single status and making her the third wheel, and who had never laughed during sex until the age of 55. For some reason, she was reduced to a two-episode arc about deodorant, and not even one related to changes in body odor due to menopause!
Sure, absent Samantha, And Just Like That probably wasn’t going to be as much about sex as the original series with that word in its title. One can’t help but smell a whiff of internalized ageism from the same production team, especially when other shows and movies such as Golden Girls, Grace and Frankie, Gloria Bell, Babygirl and Miranda July’s All Fours have absolutely gone there. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, then, that we’ve never so much as glimpsed an estrogen patch or seen a bottle of lubricant on a bedside table in one of Harry and Charlotte’s plentiful bedroom scenes, or during Carrie and Duncan’s (Jonathan Cake) much anticipated tryst. After all, former sex columnist Carrie was squeamish about discussing masturbation on her sex and gender podcast and with her husband, the late John “Big” Preston (Chris Noth) in the pilot of And Just Like That. But when the best ignored Sex and the City 2 movie is more radically open about menopause than a TV series made over a decade later, then you know you’ve got a serious problem.
Unfortunately now, with the news that its third season will be its last, And Just Like That will never get the chance to explore territory that might actually have been groundbreaking for TV.
Scarlett Harris is a culture critic and author of A Diva Was a Female Version of a Wrestler: An Abbreviated Herstory of World Wrestling Entertainment. You can follow her on Bluesky and read her previously published work at her website and Substack, The Scarlett Woman.
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