AND... JUST LIKE THAT?

by Hattie Rogovin

Like every other Gen-Z girl I know, I fell hard and fast for the wild world of Sex and the City (SATC). Premiering in 1998, the show aired on television for six seasons––and then three subsequent motion pictures––following the lives of Carrie Bradshaw, Miranda Hobbes, Samantha Jones, and Charlotte York.

The show dove into every taboo and unspoken topic of the time––masturbation, BDSM, and the exploration of sexuality, to name a few––paving the way for conversations that ultimately impacted society greatly…ones whose reverberations are still felt today. SATC quickly became my go to comfort show. Knowing that women have struggled with the drab sexual and romantic scene in NYC since the early 2000s was a mildly depressing fact I found solace in. At the time, exploring the sex lives of four independent women living in New York City was novel; the four women were never all in a relationship simultaneously…one of them was always grappling with the nuanced and complex sex scene in the city. The four characters developed outside of the show, becoming sensational in pop culture. It’s a universally unspoken desire to never be described as a “Carrie,” but rather “somewhere between a Samantha and a Miranda.”

So, when HBO Max announced a continuation of the series, titled And Just Like That… (AJLT) I was elated to have another chance to delve back into the world of SATC; I can’t quite verbalize what I was expecting from the show, but I do know that it let me down in more ways than I can count, and lived up to not a single one of my expectations. 

One of the show’s greatest challenges that I foresaw from the first mention of a SATC remake was going to be finding a way to make the story lines as scintillating as they were in the early 2000s. Part of the magic of the original SATC was that the four women were never settled down; there seemed to be a restless energy that matched the pace of the city and allowed an audience to be infinitely entertained. Crafting AJLT around the three steady romantic relationships––as well as the absence of Samantha, arguably the most entertaining character––caused the episode to fall flat in so many ways. The lives of Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte somehow became less progressive and interesting 20 years later.

Another obstacle the show does and will face is the complete lack of diversity. The world of television and film is becoming increasingly diverse; sharing the stories of under-represented individuals offers valuable representation and allows for a wider audience, something film and television makers should strive to do. So, seeing HBO Max invest so many resources into the production and marketing of a show that revolves around the lives of three white, heterosexual, upper-class, 55 year old women was incredibly disappointing and fell short of everything platforms such as HBO Max claim to work towards. 

Finally, even if there had been interesting story lines and further diversity in the main cast, the pilot episode of AJLT still would have been an epic failure because of the numerous ways in which the writing fell short. The pacing was arrhythmic, the jokes were completely lacking in wit, and the sentences that were flying out of the mouths of three women I would have said could do or say no wrong were endlessly upsetting, and borderline offensive, at best. It was as though everything that made the original SATC work and become such an iconic piece of television was thrown out the window and instead, replaced with bad acting, a poorly written script, and a dry storyline, all of which amplified the worst qualities in each character.

SATC should have ended after their final season, and the production of even one film to follow would have been excessive and unnecessary. There has been no set of character bibles and intriguing plot lines ever written that would be able to survive six seasons, an almost 10 year break, three films, another 10 year break, and then a reboot. Perhaps it is time to admit that every concept––no matter how monumental and impactful it was at the time––will run its course. Instead of beating a dead horse, let’s turn our attention to the immense pool of talent coming from younger generations––stories that when put on the big screen, will hopefully have the same cultural impact, or one even larger, that SATC did 20 years ago.