"and just like that" is back, baby
Best line: "Unknown caller. Better not be the democrats again!" -- Carrie Bradshaw
Pictured: vintage Miranda boob
Whatever you think of the women in Sex and the City, and the era they sprung out of, it is undeniable that they all possessed an unmoving inner strength, a Nietzchean will to power that allowed them to survive in the cutthroat, hyper capitalist New York nineties. Sure, it’s more than a bit silly, and not the most realist, but it does portray a version of reality which is astute enough in its psychological acuity to cut deep, to be relatable to the single woman. It portrays the comradery of single life, friendship when your friends are each out for their own interests, though at the end of the day you are united. Men and money, material luxury and happiness, love even, are all just out of reach, prizes in that chaotic game of going out, getting laid, getting heartbroken, then waking up and trying to make something of oneself, while living with oneself in the meantime.
As anyone who has described themselves as “a Miranda, with a little bit of Carrie on my worst days,” Sex and the City represents four distinct bourgeois women that can be boiled down to their archetypal forms. Samantha sees the world in terms of power, and possesses a relatable, kind of addictive cynicism. Carrie is the most intuitive character, the obsessive narrator of her own life. Miranda is a neurotic, but possesses a frank practicality, and, one can argue, the most self-respect. Charlotte is the show’s moral compass, with the most classic sense of right and wrong.
It’s an extended joke, really, a publicist, a lawyer, a writer, and a WASP walk into a bar (though Charlotte is a gallerist, her career is always secondary to her utmost desire: to marry). Big (the archetypal bad boy, or any man a woman is drawn to in spite of her best instincts) is sitting at the bar. He looks up and says, “Hi ladies, how can I manipulate you into loving me?” The publicist says, you’re married? Perfect, I can sleep with you when I take lunch and we never have to talk about your wife. The lawyer says, I know what you want to do, and it’s destroy me. The WASP says, I don’t think I’d take you home to meet my mother. The writer says: you don’t have to do anything, I’ve already decided I’m in love with you, and I’m going to write about it when I get home.
In the first season of the reboot the archetypes of the original show crumble; in the show’s desperate argument for its right to exist it dips into an uncanny dream-world of wealth and wokeness that is truly stunning to behold. The men are all totally emasculated, the long joke finally landing its punchline with Big’s spectacularly pathetic death, collapsing in agony while trying to lose his pandemic weight; Miranda’s sweet husband Steve usurped by nonbinary comedian Che Diaz. The women, for their part, deal with white privilege and middle age with an existential anguish that at times approaches hysteria, while their brunches and dinners become ever more ridiculous, seeming to exist just to fill time before they all follow Big up to the big Peloton in the sky.
The second season so far doesn’t quite live up to the first in terms of white-hot are-you-kidding-me energy, but it does expand the world of And Just Like That in a myriad of ways, including a jaunt to Los Angeles wherein Che Diaz makes a joke about “taking an uber from their bedroom to their bathroom” unlike in New York, where you would just walk.
In the first episode, Carrie wishes she could eat poached eggs on toast “like royalty” and has caviar sent to her by her diverse friend and real estate agent Seema. She and all of her friends are going to the “Met Ball” (disappointingly never shown), and their outfits for the theme “veiled beauty” include a kinky Alice-in-Wonderland-at-Zebulon getup (Charlotte), a sexy post-orgasm head-orb (Charlotte’s diverse friend Lisa), a fairy-godmother wedding dress for an airy “I’m-moving-on-from-my-grief” vibe (Carrie), and just a suit for the eternally angry gay best friend Anthony, because he is a veiled threat.
The show does a lot with exploring the glamorous and sexy world of corporate podcasting, seeing as both Carrie and Miranda are sleeping with people from The Carrie Bradshaw Podcast. Miranda is sleeping with Che Diaz, of course, and Carrie is sleeping with her producer. She calls Che while Miranda is putting on a strap-on (“please, you scream ‘I want a dick,’” is another fabulous Che Diaz observation) and Carrie asks Che if she should try to make their tryst more than sex. Miranda, listening in, tells her that if she sleeps with someone at work she’ll lose her power, and of course Samantha is missing for an appearance in the next scene swilling a martini to retort, “well honey, if you screw your producer under the table, he can still edit with his hands, right? You kind of…have him by the balls.”
In the second episode, things get real with the bursting of the podcast bubble (“we were bought, by Apple, or Peach or whatever”) and Carrie loses her job. Of course the main consequence of this setback is the loss of her one-night-a-week fuck-buddy; she is more than happy to be unemployed, which admittedly does fit with the original series’ characterization of a woman who went into thousands of dollars of credit card debt buying shoes and playing socialite while writing one column per week. It will be interesting to see what Carrie decides to pivot to next now that her star has fallen a bit, and if her career trajectory will be what brings Sam (her ex-publicist) back into the ladies’ orbit.
Fan-favorite Che Diaz, the “Queer Non-Binary Mexican-Irish Diva” is back in full force, starring in a show based on their own life, but the network is making them go on a diet and trying to cast Tony Danza as their Italian father. You’re never really in control of your own image, are you? It’s difficult to put a finger on why the Miranda-Che dynamic is so nauseating, but the love scenes between them are uncomfortable, the lack of chemistry between the two actors creating a vibe somewhere between a porn set and two dogs being forced to mate. Maybe it’s because Che is so lame, and Sara Ramirez so clearly not in on the joke, or maybe Miranda was only Miranda (the archetype) when she was a closet case, and watching her geriatric form live out the repressed fantasies of her younger self is somewhat depressing, depressing in a way the show will likely never reckon with in a real way. Miranda’s children and husband are of course out of sight, because to deal with the heavy emotions of a mother of a sixteen-year-old running off to LA with her new queer lover is tough shit. Girls did a version of this plot-line to great effect with Hannah’s father. The image of Hannah’s mother reduced to a humiliated wreck, refusing to let him move out so she doesn’t have to be alone, is one that sticks with you; it lends both parties in a difficult situation dignity. Where is Steve? Alone, one can assume, but the viewer is left to wonder.
And Just Like That is a show which maybe should be a tragedy. It has a great theme—the loss of its own relevancy. Instead it opts for fantasy-land, weightlessly skimming the surface of each character’s emptiness without plunging in to the heart of things.
Each scene is a parade of “rich people problems.” All the purses have their own little chairs, and all the nannies and seamstresses have the stomach flu. Charlotte’s non-binary child “Rock” does not want to uphold heteropatriarchal beauty standards to pull in Charlotte’s waistline for the Met Ball, and her daughter Lily sells her Chanel dress to buy a keyboard so she can write songs about the cage of privilege. Carrie’s producer “circles back” to her advertorial vaginal monologue after sex, with an unsubtle Final Draft product placement included. Lisa has an MFA in film and she can secure funding for her doc without her husband’s support, goddamnit.
The women from the original series got everything they wanted and more; now they have children who wear bucket hats, a husband that died on a Peloton, and lots and lots of galas to hide the hole in the center of their universe, the force that was moving them all relentlessly forward.