And Just Like That turned out to be a crushing disappointment
I was looking forward to the new Sex and The City reboot. I’d been a fan, back in the day, and I was hoping that, after the disastrous third SATC movie, the new show would bring some redemption. Sadly, it was just the opposite, as the new show, And Just Like That, proved to be far worse than anything that the franchise had offered before.
And I can pinpoint one reason for that. It seems like the writers really hated all the characters. And it seemed like they wanted the viewers to hate them, too.
Where do I begin? Let’s start with Carrie. How could the writers not have her call 911 when she arrived home to find that her husband had suffered a massive heart attack but he was still alive? It was incomprehensible that a sane, competent woman wouldn’t immediately call for help. This omission was a total deal-breaker, and it happened in episode one.
Then, to add insult to injury, the writers portrayed Carrie later on as desperate to have her twenty-something neighbour think of her as cool, and doing really pathetic things to try to make it happen.
Carrie came across as clueless and pathetic
It was excruciating to watch an intelligent, recently-widowed woman in her fifties worrying about such trivialities. And, I know from experience that when a person goes through a profound loss of a loved one, they have no energy to spend on trivial things like whether or not they’re perceived as cool. So, not only was it undignified, it wasn’t plausible. Carrie just came across as incredibly shallow in those scenes.
Next, let’s look at how the character of Miranda was presented. The writers seemed to hate her the most, because they had her doing all the stupid things. In every single episode, Miranda engaged in at least one, if not several, instances of utterly ridiculous behaviour.
To start with, there were the awful, awful things she said in her first human rights class. It was almost unbearable to watch. If someone had written a novel and this character had appeared in the first few pages, the editor would have forbidden the writer to leave her like that, unless she was intended as the villain. But in AJLT, the character started out as entirely unlikeable, and then it got worse.
Miranda’s attraction to Che Diaz was incomprehensible, seeing that the character of Che was universally disliked and was recently considered to be the most hated character on television. The way that Miranda lost her mind over Che made no sense at all, as Che treated Miranda poorly, at the best of times.
Che was downright loathsome
And speaking of Che, the writers really seemed to hate them, too, as they wrote the character as a comedian who wasn’t funny, and as a romantic interest who nobody could possibly love.
And then, for Miranda to give up her prestigious human rights fellowship to follow Che to LA for pilot season seemed completely insane. Anyone who watched SATC knows how badly it went when Samantha did something similar, following Smith to LA for his film career.
Miranda had the benefit of her friend’s experience, so her character should have known better. Also, she was supposed to be a brilliant lawyer, and a feminist. How could she abandon her own, very important plans to run after Che?
Miranda came across as a walking disaster
It was so disappointing to see the character do that, especially in 2022. It was like Miranda was written as a cautionary tale for how not to go about pursuing a romantic relationship. And on a side note, was I the only one who was convinced that Miranda’s trip to Cleveland was a set-up for disaster? Was I the only one screaming at the TV set, “don’t go! It’s not going to end well for you!” I think not.
No-one shows up to surprise their love interest in a work of fiction without things going south. That’s writing 101. Why did the writers even bother?
And let’s talk about the scene in which Miranda is having loud, drunken sex in the kitchen of Carrie’s apt while Carrie is lying in bed after hip surgery. That was so hard to watch. And not because it was in any way steamy. It was cringe-worthy.
And it was deal-breaker behaviour on the part of a supposed friend. No self-respecting person would have tolerated that. The writers must have hated both Miranda, for making the character behave so badly, and Carrie, for forgiving her friend so easily.
Charlotte appeared racist and self-centered
Next is Charlotte, whose pursuit of Lisa Todd Wexley seemed almost fetishistic, as though she wanted to befriend Lisa for reasons other than the fact that they happened to like one-other. It was super uncomfortable when Charlotte tried to invite her Black neighbour to a dinner party at her house to “prove” to Lisa that she wasn’t her only Black friend—which, of course, she was.
But that was nothing compared to having to watch Charlotte’s character mistaking one of the Black women at Lisa’s dinner party with another woman of her acquaintance, implying that Charlotte couldn’t distinguish one woman of colour from another. Could the writers have hated her any more?
In an unrelated storyline, the writers made Charlotte appear terribly petty in refusing to apologize to her husband for knocking him over on the tennis court. Even at the end of the scene, the only thing that seemed to matter to her was not coming across to her friends as a bickering couple.
The supporting characters were painful to watch
When it came to the character, Anthony, the writers had the dial on him turned up to eleven at all times. The character came across as a shrieking harpy, screaming at everyone, all the time. It was deeply painful to watch, and I felt sorry for the actor portraying him.
And the new character of Seema. Why did they have to make her a smoker? It was totally unnecessary. She and Carrie had plenty of other things to bond over. She came across as dumb to be smoking in 2022.
And why did the writers have Lisa pulling up in a white stretch limo at the charity house-painting event? It came across as tone-deaf to be spending money so lavishly when the same funds could have gone to the charity. It made the character come across as shockingly entitled and oblivious.
Steve came across as a loser
And poor Steve. The writers wrote him as such a loser. They turned his deafness into a bad joke and made him impotent in his fifties, while still hopelessly devoted to Miranda—a woman who treated him like garbage. As an actor was he mortified to say his lines?
In the scene where Miranda was trying to have sex with Steve, why couldn’t the writers have gotten the couple to make love, and then show Miranda the next morning realizing that it wasn’t about the lack of sex—it was that she wasn’t happy in the relationship? At least then, Steve wouldn’t have been emasculated.
And when Miranda broke up with her husband, why couldn’t the writers have made her say, “there’s nothing wrong with you, Steve. It’s just that I realized I’m queer.” That would have enabled Steve to maintain his dignity. But no, the writers had to portray him as pathetic as possible.
Characters in fiction have to be likeable, or no-one will want to stay with them
Speaking of cautionary tales, this entire series is a cautionary tale about how not to write characters. Sure, it’s interesting when a character messes up. It’s interesting when they fall short, but the characters have to learn from their mistakes. They have to grow and evolve. When they are written as so completely oblivious, pathetic, and/or unlikeable, and they are incapable of changing, the viewer stops wanting to spend time with them.
As much as I enjoyed the old SATC characters, warts and all, I can’t get behind the new AJLT characters and I may never be able to; not unless the writers start making them even a little bit more likeable, admirable and relatable.
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