In its third season, the show leans into the cringe again, and rings true when it allows its white liberal characters to mess things up
Are any of the writers on And Just Like That (AJLT) reading this? Because I have several helpful suggestions to bring the current series of your Sex and the City reboot into 2025: Charlotte’s husband, the hitherto harmless Harry, could start pressuring her into an open marriage, involving whatever passes for wild sex parties on the Upper East Side. Miranda could soon enter her Chappell-Roan-power-ballad era by hooking up with a sexually captivating, but emotionally unavailable, decades-younger woman. And what about a big reveal involving Aidan, who has been draining Carrie’s bank accounts all along (because he’s secretly a Reddit-radicalised, misogynist crypto bro now). I’d also suggest we see and hear a lot less from the children. The existence of Brady, Brock, Tilly and Twerp should only ever be referenced occasionally and obliquely, for form’s sake. Y’know, like how people of colour were treated all the way through the original Sex and the City series?
Ironically, racial politics is the one area in which AJLT is doing just fine, even without my help. This is not the consensus view, I’m aware. Many fans entered a state of full-body cringe during the first season, when Miranda wondered aloud if she was having “a white saviour moment” when fighting off a mugger attacking her Black friend, and are yet to regain full use of their sphincter muscles. But the fact is, AJLT understands the specific whiteness of wealthy white women, in a way that not only vastly improves on the original show’s run, but which could also teach other contemporary TV shows a thing or two about “diversity” and “representation”.
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