Once I’d stopped laughing at the news that Sex and the City’s unfortunate sequel And Just Like That had met an untimely end – either by creative choice or by last-minute axing, depending on who you believe – I found myself awash with grief. Not for And Just Like That, which was always so thoroughly awful that its demise should really have been considered a mercy killing, but for the characters I once adored. What a sad, depleting end for the fictional Manhattanites who raised me. By the end, Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte had been rendered dull lunatics on a series that never successfully justified its own existence. I thought I’d ended up despising And Just Like That. I now realise it broke my heart.
And Just Like That’s final episode was, to little surprise, abominable. It was by turns moronic and confusing, unfunny and hateful, and seemingly edited with a hacksaw – vague approximations of season-long story arcs were brought to abrupt ends, characters did things that made no sense, and Carrie herself relearnt a lesson she’d already learnt years ago. She chose herself, essentially, And Just Like That’s ultimate theme being – I guess? – that it’s completely fine for a woman to exist without a man. It’s as if Charlotte’s gorgeous epiphany from Sex and the City season four (“Maybe we can be each other’s soulmates? And then we could just let men be these great, nice guys to have fun with?”) never happened. Which it probably didn’t – for these are pod people wearing the skins of women who used to be brilliant, and regurgitating ideas that were already played out 25 years ago.
