By Sara Bright
There is a specific kind of grief reserved for the return of something you once loved, only to find it hollowed out, wearing the face of a familiar friend but with the soul of a stranger. This is the grief that hangs over And Just Like That…, the sequel to Sex and the City which concluded its run this week not with a bang, but with the quiet, slightly desperate twirl of Carrie Bradshaw in a pink ballgown, dancing alone in her apartment. The moment was intended to signify contentment, a woman finally whole on her own. But for many who watched, it felt less like a triumphant conclusion and more like the final, exhausted sigh of a project that never found its footing, its purpose, or its heart.
The feverish excitement that met the show’s announcement in 2021 was rooted in a powerful nostalgia, a desire to reconnect with four women who had, for a generation, been our guides through the labyrinth of modern love, sex, and friendship. We wanted to see what wisdom they had accrued, how their bond had deepened, how they were navigating life in their fifties. What we got instead was a cautionary tale about the dangers of resurrection. And Just Like That… was not a continuation; it was a ghost story, a show haunted by the memory of its better, smarter, sharper self.
The Phantom Limb
The first, and most obvious, wound was the absence of Samantha Jones. The departure of Kim Cattrall was more than a casting problem; it was a catastrophic structural failure from which the show never recovered. Samantha was not just the comic relief or the purveyor of sexual punchlines. She was a fundamental pillar of the show’s ideology. She represented a form of female freedom that was unapologetic, self-possessed, and utterly independent of male validation. Her absence created a vacuum, a phantom limb that left the central friendship feeling unbalanced and incomplete.
The remaining trio, once a perfectly calibrated machine of distinct but complementary personalities, suddenly felt adrift. Without Samantha’s grounding cynicism and joyous carnality to anchor them, Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte often seemed to float into the ether of their own neuroses. The show’s clumsy attempt to write her out – a petty feud over a PR gig – felt hollow and inauthentic, a disservice to a friendship that had been portrayed as one of the great television romances. Her brief, 70-second cameo in the second season, filmed in isolation, only served to highlight the chasm. It was a fleeting glimpse of the ghost, a painful reminder of the energy and wit the new iteration so desperately lacked.
A Crisis of Character
Perhaps the most telling failure of And Just Like That… was its profound misunderstanding of its own characters. The women we once knew as sharp, confident, and complex were reborn as shrill caricatures of themselves. If the original series was a finely rendered portrait, the sequel was a hastily drawn cartoon.
Miranda Hobbes, the fiercely intelligent, straight-talking Harvard lawyer, was lobotomised into a bumbling, perpetually confused mess, forever putting her foot in her mouth or physically stumbling through scenes. Her exploration of her queerness, a potentially rich and nuanced storyline, was squandered on a relationship with Che Diaz, a character so excruciatingly written they became a cultural shorthand for televisual cringe. The Miranda we knew would have eviscerated Che’s painful stand-up comedy with a single, perfectly timed eye-roll; the new Miranda was bafflingly enthralled.
Charlotte York Goldenblatt, always the most traditional of the group, was amplified into a maniacal, one-dimensional parody of an Upper East Side mother. And Carrie Bradshaw, the woman whose voice and curiosity once formed the very spine of the show, seemed to have regressed. The former sex columnist became strangely prudish, her famous inquisitiveness replaced by a heightened, almost pathological, self-absorption. After the death of her husband, Big, she did not evolve; she simply reverted, falling back into the arms of her other great love, Aidan, for a storyline that felt less like a meaningful reunion and more like a failure of imagination.
The attempts to rectify the original show’s notorious lack of diversity were well-intentioned but executed with a stunning lack of grace. New characters of colour like Seema, Lisa Todd Wexley, and Nya were introduced, but they often felt less like fully integrated friends and more like accessories, brought in to service the central trio’s personal growth. They were rarely afforded the same depth or complexity, existing in orbits that only occasionally intersected with the main narrative in a meaningful way. It felt like ticking boxes rather than building a world.
The Lost Voice
The original Sex and the City was a marvel of structural integrity. It was the television equivalent of a perfectly designed building. Each 25-minute episode was a tight, self-contained unit, built around the central pillar of Carrie’s newspaper column. Her voiceover was not just narration; it was the show’s engine, its conscience, its organising principle. It took disparate storylines – a dating mishap for Charlotte, a sexual adventure for Samantha, a career dilemma for Miranda – and wove them together into a coherent thematic tapestry.
And Just Like That… demolished this structure and, in doing so, lost its way entirely. By abandoning the central conceit of the column, the show became rudderless. Episodes bloated to 45 minutes of meandering, disconnected scenes. Plot grenades were thrown in and then inexplicably forgotten – a miscarriage, a burnt-down apartment, the brief hook-up of Miranda and Charlotte’s teenage children. The narrative became a chaotic jumble of bizarre situations and emotional cul-de-sacs that rarely led to any satisfying resolution or meaningful insight.
Without Carrie’s voice to guide us, to find the universal in the specific, the show lost its intellectual and emotional core. It ceased to be a witty exploration of the human condition and became just a series of things that happened to a group of very wealthy women in New York. The reintroduction of the theme music in the final scene felt less like a nostalgic tribute and more like an insult, a reminder of the sharp, cohesive storytelling this new version could never hope to replicate.
A Wasted Opportunity
Of course, resurrecting a cultural touchstone is a thankless task. The weight of expectation is immense. And to its credit, And Just Like That… occasionally offered flashes of what it could have been. There were moments of genuine emotional honesty, particularly in Sarita Choudhury’s portrayal of Seema, a woman navigating later-in-life romance with a weary glamour that felt authentic and fresh. A scene where she confronts Carrie for her casual thoughtlessness, or when Carrie finally finds the strength to end things with Aidan, showed glimmers of the sharp, engaging drama the show was capable of.
But these moments were islands in a sea of creative missteps. Ultimately, the show will be remembered not for its successes, but for its profound betrayal of its own legacy. It took a show that was witty, insightful, and, for its time, daring, and transformed it into something that was often clumsy, shallow, and strangely conservative. It was a chance to tell a nuanced, intelligent story about women navigating friendship, love, grief, and identity in middle age. Instead, it gave us vertigo, cringe-worthy comedy, and narrative amnesia. It wasn’t a new chapter. It was a poorly written epilogue that we would all do well to forget.
