‘And Just Like That…’ Recapped Entirely From Memory
Somewhere, Kim Cattrall was like, “I bind you from doing harm, Carrie. Harm against other people and harm against yourself…”
So, about a year and a half ago, I was working for this fashion magazine when, just like that, And Just Like That…, HBO Max’s Sex and the City reboot, was suddenly on TV! That’s when I said to my editor at the time something like, “Oh, hey, I watched Sex and the City a whole lot in college—like, way too much. Like more than can possibly be healthy for a human person. And now I have really weirdly complicated feeeeelings about it, so maybe I should write about And Just Like That a lot now?”
I said all that on Zoom with all my colleagues present, and at first they were all like, “Are you ok?” And I wasn’t actually sure if I was! Because I’d suddenly realized that I possessed an extremely thorough, encyclopedic knowledge of Sex and the City, and I just didn’t know what to do with the fact that this super problematic TV show that, let’s face it, has aged pretty terribly and should have been left to rot in the early 2000s where it belonged, took up so much space in my brain.
Ultimately, though, I got over that—kinda—and I spent the next 10 weeks or so writing random, hyper-specific takes about And Just Like That for the magazine’s website, and having a pretty great time doing it, too! The show was so…dumb and tone-deaf, but also just compellingly pretty to look at, that it made sense to treat it like a strange oddity from another planet—getting bizarrely obsessed with a $2,600 blanket that appeared in several episodes, parsing the possible infanticidal subtext of Miranda beating up some dude in a Chucky costume, drawing connections between Carrie Bradshaw, Edina Monsoon, and the Joker. It was a great time to be alive and doing important TV criticisms!
Here’s the thing though: And Just Like That is…bad. It’s bad TV. It’s fun bad TV, for sure. But it is, fundamentally, a bad television show—a cringe-inducing relic of the early 2000s resurrected by people who don’t seem to understand the world into which they’ve unleashed it. And despite having had such a very nice time covering—ugh and fine, whatever, watching—Season 1, I have not felt the urge to re-visit it in the year-plus since it ended.
You see where this is going, right? With the show’s second season premiering this week, I’m going to plumb the repressed depths of my tortured psyche to see if I can remember what happened in And Just Like That’s first season. Here we go:
It is 2021 and the global COVID-19 pandemic is officially over! Omicron-schmomicron! Delta? Never even met ha! We find three of our original heroines enjoying a random afternoon lunch—like real people find time to do together all the time—at a crowded restaurant and they’re all like, “Gee wiz, isn’t it good-times that COVID is fully over now forever!”
Then this old lady named Bitzy who was in like two random episodes of Sex and the City shows up and is like, “One, two, three…Hey, wait just a dog-gone minyoote! Didn’t there used to be four of you tramps?”
And Charlotte is like, “Oh, yeah, Samantha is fully dead now.”
But then Carrie and Miranda are like, “No no no, that’s just a joke because the whole Internet thought we were going to kill her off because Kim Cattrall refused to do this show because she hates us. Samantha’s not dead, she’s just dead to us.” (Meanwhile, Kim Cattrall was somewhere on the set of Queer as Folk at the time being like, “I bind you from doing harm, Carrie. Harm against other people and harm against yourself…” But I guess that worked about as well for her as it did for Robin Tunney in The Craft because Queer as Folk is canceled and And Just Like That persists!)
Ok, anyway, here’s where everyone’s at:
Samantha: Dead.
No! God, weren’t you paying attention to the previous paragraphs?! What actually happened was: Carrie, an extremely rich woman, decided she didn’t want to pay her best friend to be her publicist anymore, so Samantha ran away to London in a huff and basically cut off all communication with everyone she knows in New York. All very relatable and normal.
Charlotte: Still married to her former divorce attorney Harry. Still Jewish. Has two kids: Lilly, her oldest adopted daughter, who at one point compares herself to a rescue dog, which…feels like a real red-flag re: Charlotte’s adoptive parenting style; and “Rose,” her youngest, who is initially presented as this quirky, rebellious tomboy but then fully blows Charlotte’s mind by coming out as…I think genderqueer? Or maybe trans? I genuinely cannot remember their pronouns, but at one point they’re like “I don’t feel like a girl,” and they change their name to Rock. Also, Charlotte’s main gay Anthony at one point gets on some real toxic elder cis gay bullshit by just totally dismissing Rock’s gender identity—which…while gross, now that I’m thinking about it, kinda makes total sense for these clueless privileged people who have apparently been in hyper sleep since 2004. (Oh my god! What if Anthony is, like, a Gays Against Groomers gay in Season 2, and Woke Charlotte has to do an intervention or something? I would watch that!)
Oh, and remember how Charlotte was obsessed with Elizabeth Taylor and named her King Charles spaniel after her? (Everyone remembers that, right?) Well now she has an English bulldog named Richard Burton, which is *chef kiss* greatest joke in this whole entire show. (Seriously, maybe just stop reading now, it doesn’t get any better than that.) Also, Charlotte is intent on befriending her very rich and influential neighbor Nicole Ari Parker (no relation to Sarah Jessica) who is somehow also very cool and down-to-earth and super fun. Of the four non-white characters introduced in And Just Like That, Nicole Ari Parker’s is 10/10 the best addition to the series.
Miranda: Wears terrible gray wigs now for some reason. Has quit being a corporate lawyer because she discovered politics and is [*Geri Blank voice*] back in skewl, unlearning neoliberalism and lean-in White Feminism from Karren Pittman. Also: still married to Steve, and somehow hates her son Brady even more now that he is a disgusting, sexually incontinent teenager than she did when he was a disgusting regular incontinent baby—and she hated that baby a lot. Oh, and she has “a drinking problem” because of…the pandemic, I guess?
And Carrie: Still somehow happily married to Mr. John Big, which, like HOW??? And she has given up writing to co-host a drive-time radio show podcast with Che Diaz, the world’s foremost non-binary concert comedianist.
Except then John Big’s Peleton murders him in the shower one night, and Carrie has to spend the next 9 episodes having a grief. Which basically drives her fully nuts. First, she entombs John Big in the world’s most aggressively Brutalist funeral parlor. Then she spends, like, a week tormenting his second ex-wife Natasha by stalking her everywhere and eventually…I think murdering her in a Starbucks bathroom? (Lolz, that is not what really happened, but almost!)
She also randomly decides to sell the fancy apartment she and John Big shared and move back into the old one-bedroom walk-up where she used to live and still nonsensically owns so that she can store all her shoes there. This is how she meets Sarita Choudhury, her very fun and cool real estate agent who smokes all the time, and is the new Samantha kinda, so they become best friends.
But oh, god, the real estate stuff is insane in this show. Like, peak Sex and the City out-of-touch wealth nonsense. Like, there’s a whole episode where Carrie just buys and moves into an insane luxury apartment in I think the Financial District maybe, and then after a week decides she hates it and moves back into her old walk-up. I’m like, “Madam, there is a housing shortage crisis in New York City!”
Meanwhile, Miranda gets a crush on Che Diaz, despite the fact that they 1) nonconsentually smoke pot in elevators with other people in them, 2) gave drugs to Miranda’s gross teenage son at John Big’s funeral, 3) are not funny at all, 4) are annoyingly stoned all the time, 5) are some sort of evil chaos agent sent to ruin our lives. Basically, Miranda is having a midlife crisis and for some reason the show decided that, rather than being a symptom of that, Che Dias is the solution to it?
So, Miranda and Che start having an affair—literally they have sex in Carrie’s kitchen while Miranda is supposed to be babysitting her friend who just had hip replacement surgery or whatever. Then Miranda gets sober, leaves Steve, and abandons her plan to be a progressive feminist lawyer to go live with Che in Hollywood. Which I guess is what this show thinks is *growth*.
Oh, also, at some point Stanford fucks off to Japan for some reason, because Willie Garson died during filming, so that’s the last we’ll probably ever hear of him. RIP WG!
Meanwhile, Carrie dresses up like the Joker to write a book about grief, but her publisher is like, “This is too depressing,” and forces her to go on Tinder dates. And that somehow leads to her dating this guy who is a teacher at Charlotte and Nicole Ari Parker’s kids’ school, I think? But that basically goes nowhere, because Carrie is still griefing, and also, let’s be honest, this woman was never going to get serious about someone on a teacher’s salary.
Then, out of nowhere, John Big’s ghost is suddenly haunting Carrie’s reading lamp or something. So, she decides to cast out his wayward spirit by going to Paris to dump his ashes off a bridge while dressed as an orange sherbet meringue.
Freed from both the poltergeist of John Big and also Che Diaz—who, recall, has kidnapped Miranda to Hollywood—Carrie then takes over their podcast in a bloodless coup and randomly makes out with her handsome producer out of nowhere.
And, yeah, that’s pretty much everything that happened in Season 1 of AJLT. Except for some random other stuff like:
Charlotte’s daughter catches her doing oral sex on Evan Handler’s prosthetic penis.
Charlotte fully white-splains Black art to Nicole Ari Parker’s Black dinner guests and it’s like, totally not played as a joke. Haaaaa…uuuugghhh.
The show basically throws Miranda a Pride parade for getting one of her classmates’ pronouns right.
Miranda tricks poor Karen Pittman into being her only Black friend.
Poor Karen Pittman has to do a pretty under-developed fertility issues storyline.
Sarita Choudhury starts dating this night club owner who is clearly a dirtbag.
Jonathan Groff tries to make Carrie get full facial reconstruction surgery or something?
So, I think I’m maybe gonna do some more recaps or something about the new season. I dunno. We’ll see…