AND JUST LIKE THAT: New York Is A Crime Ridden Hell Hole!
Also, I guess I’m a monster for not caring about Carrie's grief.
New York is a crime ridden hell hole! Everything’s falling apart! The center cannot hold! We’re all on the brink of societal collapse! Ruffians are stealing purses and whole jewelry collections all over the place! Thank the ghost of Ed Koch that we have a show like And Just Like That to shine a light on the urban chaos we’re all living with on a daily basis!
Everything starts out normally enough, with Carrie walking past Bryant Park just minding her own business when suddenly someone starts screaming her name. She tries real hard to ignore them, but then she realizes it’s that loud girl who lives on the first floor of her building and she’s like “Oh god, I have to talk to a youth now.”
Remember how Lisette—that’s this precious child’s name—is a jewelry artisan girl boss? Well, she’s having a big jewelry show party on Friday and wants Carrie to come.
“Shhhhhuuuuurre, we’ll see, bye!” Carrie hedges and then runs directly away to go record the audiobook of her big new grief memoir about the death of John Big.
Then a hideous crime is committed! Seema’s purse gets stolen! Right out of her hands! In broad daylight! Like in the 80s! She’s devastated due to loving that idiotically expensive bag more than literally anything, and vows to take her revenge on all the unwashed poors who do crimes in the city.
Back to Carrie: she’s doing a terrible job reading her sad book. She can’t get through the chapter about finding John Big murdered by his Peleton (crime), and it’s, like, yet another example in a long tradition of Carrie being fully unequipped to handle situations and work commitments that it really seems like she should be prepared for. Like how she didn’t have email until 2002 (HOW DID SHE FILE HER WEEKLY NEWSPAPER COLUMN???), and also remember that insane time she knocked on Miranda’s door and her housekeeper or whatever answered, and Carrie fully glitched out and didn’t know how to interact with another human? Should she maybe be put in a conservatorship like Britney Spears? (CRIME: a joke about Britney Spears’s conservatorship!)
Anyway, Carrie has plenty of time to try to read her book because her publisher got her five full days of studio time. I feel like this scene lasted five days! And like, what is with the seemingly pointless mean joke about the schlubby producer guy having BO? It serves no purpose! Also, after listening to her read her supposedly heartbreaking profound grief memoir, we can all agree that Carrie is a terrible writer, right? Like, I can’t really think of a real-world comp for the type of popular bestselling author she is—I mean, I guess maybe Candace Bushnell, duh—but Joan Didion she ain’t.
The next day, I guess, Nicole Ari Parker is interviewing Professor Karen Pittman for her latest documentary because they are both serious intellectual women with careers. But then PKP’s microphone leaps into her blouse! A smokin’ hot sound guy has to fish it out for her, and PKP, who is divorcing her musician husbone, is like, “Hubba hubba!” at the sound guy, so Nicole Ari Parker makes her get his telephone numerals.
Then they have to dash off to have girl-talk lunchtime with Carrie and Charlotte. Today’s girl-talk is all about the list of mothers the teenage boys at Charlotte and Nicole Ari Parker’s kids’ school would like to do sex with. The gay bones principal (a.k.a. Jeff Hiller’s boyfriend on Somebody Somewhere) of the fancy school is trying to suppress the list, but Nicole Ari Parker has sniffed it out, and HOORAH! She and Charlotte are ON THE LIST! They they they are MILFs! Don’t you forget! (Forgive me, I literally just saw two back-to-back Tori Amos shows. I am unwell.)
Professor Karen Pittman is like, “You twits! The world is ending! Roe v. Wade! Etc!” And it def feels like the show is trolling us. Shots fired! Look out, anyone who ever criticized And Just Like That for being frivolous and oblivious to anything actual real people with jobs and lives and awareness of POLITICS has ever thought about! This show is coming for you! But then the hot sound guy texts PKP and she forgets all about all that other stuff because she’s horny for him. And that’s pretty much her story this week. CRIME!
After lunch, Carrie goes back to the studio for Day 2 of failing to do her contractually obligated audiobook. She has a whole meltdown, flees the studio, and runs straight into the arms of Bitzy Van MILFling who, recall, is also a widow due to I guess Nathan Lane not wanting to be on this show. She’s like, “Yeah, griefing Year 2 is the worst! Maybe you should get some Botox?”
But instead, Carries buys $500,000 worth of bonkers shoes in a staggering display of wealth porn. Strangely, though, consumerism does not cure her grief or the yawning emptiness inside her, so she calls up her audiobook producer and tells him she has COVID and can’t do her job.
Over in Hollywood, Che Diaz is miserable because their sit-com is terrible. But Miranda is still high on L.A. life and being so rich she doesn’t have to do a job. She considers getting a tattoo of Rosie the Robot from The Jettsons because that is who she is now: a person who gets tattoos of cartoon characters. Luckily the kindly tattoo artist guy, whose neck ink belies a deep emotional intelligence, talks her out of that one!
Back in New York, Nicole Ari Parker and Charlotte are just hanging out at their lockers at their kids’ school talking to the other moms about the MILF List. Someone has discovered which teenage boy created it, and no sooner do they speak his name than he appears like a pouting vision out of XY Magazine:
All the MILFs start drooling over him, but NAP remains composed and is just like, “Why do I feel like Blanche DuBois?” SHE IS PERFECT! GIVE HER AN EMMY NOW!
But Gay Principal is having NONE OF THIS! He wants to send the hot boy to prison forever, and Charlotte leaps to the kid’s defense. “He’s too hot to imprison! Give him to meeeeeeeee!” she salivates. And all the other moms are like, “This bitch…” But then Gay Principal is like, “You perverted hussies were ogling that child as well, so shut up!” And they do! And instead of prison, the hot boy gets sentenced to being a background actor in locker room shower scenes on Euphoria.
Sidebar: Is Charlotte wearing Carrie’s duvet?
In L.A., Miranda is in line for Che Diaz’s cursed sitcom taping when her estranged son Brady Hobbes calls her from Europe. He’s like, “Boo hoo, mommy! My girlfriend has ran away from me for plot reasons!” Miranda becomes convinced that Brady Hobbes is suicidal now, because why else would he ever call her? They hate each other! So, she sneaks her new terrible phone into the taping, and it starts ringing right in the middle of Che Diaz’s big dramatic scene with Tony Danza. Miranda gets kicked out of the studio, and then has a big fight with Che who is like, “Fuck your dumb kid! My TV SHOW is ruined forever!” Miranda realizes that Che Diaz is a sociopathic narcissist and flees back to New York to hug Brady Hobbes.
Meanwhile, Carrie has been just fucking around her apartment doing Hannibal Lecter masques and eating hamburgers while pretending to have COVID. Then one day Seema—still grieving the theft of her purse and plotting her plan to bring vigilante justice to the streets of Gotham—shows up (UNANNOUNCED! CRIME!) and is like, “Get a fucking grip, lady!”
So, Carrie snaps out of it and they go to Lisette’s jewelry party. But oh no! Crime strikes again! The waiters are stealing all the jewels! It is a HEIST! And LOLOLOL this scene is so insane. Like, why is there no security at this fancy event? Are these the real waiters who have recently been driven to a life of crime due to poverty? Or are they a gang of thieves who have the real waiters tied up somewhere? Also they…don’t seem to, like, have any weapons or masks or anything. They’re just…asking people mildly threateningly for their necklaces? I’d say they’re really bad at crime, but everyone is just giving them their jewels! No one is doing anything to stop them and Lisette is freaking out, so Carrie has the brilliant idea to scream “I HAVE COVID!” And everyone except the robbers flees in terror! But you know who does have a weapon? Seema! She pulls a little gold gun out of her purse and saves the day! (Relax tho, the gun is really just a cigarette lighter. It’s not like Seema is in the NRA or whatever.)
Except…the robbers just get away? And the next day Lisette is prostrate with grief over the loss of all her jewels. Carrie brings her some chocolates and they both take to Lisette’s bed, where somehow Carrie finds the strength to finish doing her audiobook, I guess because she’s like, “John Big may be deceased, but at least I still have all my jewels.”
Also, Seema randomly finds her beloved purse on the street, because I guess that guy who robbed her is the last criminal in New York who doesn’t know about FASHION and just tossed the precious accessory upon the sidewalk where it inexplicably remained for days and days. To celebrate, she and Carrie go to a restaurant where some hot Australian rugby guys give them actual COVID. Haha! IRONY or whatever!