Note: This story contains spoilers from “And Just Like That” Season 3, Episode 12.
And just like that … we don’t have “And Just Like That” to kick around any longer. The HBO Max reboot we all loved to hate but couldn’t stop watching ended Thursday with its Season 3 finale, “Party of One,” written by showrunner Michael Patrick King and Susan Fales-Hill, a half hour of television that feels very hard to believe was conceived as the final word on its legacy-brand mothership “Sex and the City,” though the announcement of this chapter’s end implied that all parties involved were on board with concluding the story here.
While it had some nice final moments that almost lived up to the franchise’s significance, the rest was a hodgepodge of filler — a wayward group of annoying Gen Z-ers, way too much Victor Garber (something I don’t say lightly) and way too many bathroom hijinks. It’s hard to take most of this as a serious summation of 27 years of these once truly significant pioneers of single womanhood on television.
In its better moments, the episode presented itself as a meditation on what it means to go through your later decades alone or in a committed relationship, which honestly sounds like a great uniting theme for a series that I would like to watch sometime. Instead, “And Just Like That” consistently backed away every time it got vulnerable or interesting, like a commitment-phobic lover. I had been encouraged in earlier episodes by the introduction of heavier themes like Harry (Evan Handler) being diagnosed with prostate cancer and Lisa (Nicole Ari Parker) eyeing an affair, but somehow Harry’s cancer was ultimately played for laughs and Lisa’s possible infidelity was wrapped up without consequence in one hasty scene.
In this final episode, the women attend a bridal fashion show together under a very flimsy pretense — one of the subjects of Lisa’s documentary is the designer, or something? — and they have an all-too-brief discussion on the merits of marriage. TLDR: Charlotte (Kristin Davis) and Lisa, the married ones, have their complaints but would do it all over again, Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) felt “chosen” when she married Big and Seema (Sarita Choudhury) thought she wanted to get married, but maybe she doesn’t because her current beau told her he didn’t believe in marriage while peeing in front of her that morning(!?). Carrie actually speaks Big’s name aloud here and admits that he died, which is more than we’ve gotten in previous episodes, so there’s that.
But the rest of the episode, until the final moments, sells these characters far short of their due. Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) hosts a Thanksgiving that almost everyone bails on, except for Carrie, Miranda’s son Brady (Niall Cunningham), Brady’s baby mama and her random Gen Z friends, and Mark Kasabian (Garber), a gallery owner whom Charlotte seems to be setting Carrie up with. Mark finally leaves after a literally execrable scene in which Miranda’s toilet overflows and we actually see poop on screen. Choose your favorite metaphor here for how this series is ending its run. To emphasize: Literally one of the final scenes of Miranda Hobbes on screen is her cleaning up human waste. Meanwhile, Charlotte and Harry celebrate the holiday with their own family and are thrilled when he gets his first post-cancer boner as she’s cooking Thanksgiving dinner, declaring himself, I’m sorry to say, “crisp and ready to baste.”
It’s hard to overstate the insult this all feels like to characters we have loved and followed for decades.
This series finale purports to have a thesis, that all along it was about how it’s fine to grow old without a mate, as long as you have your friends beside you. The final moments were some of the best of the entire series, showing Carrie blasting Barry White’s “You’re the First, the Last, My Everything” in her beautiful house, alone, eating pumpkin pie while standing in the kitchen, still in her striking red tulle skirt that feels like an homage to the tutu in the original’s iconic opening credits. She’s finally relishing being alone, indulging in what the original series memorably dubbed “secret single behavior,” stuff you can do only when by yourself at home. Then she types a new ending to her book: “The woman realized she was not alone, she was on her own.” I have many complaints about this book she’s writing, but this was a nice denouement.
To be honest, I like this ending better than the original’s over-the-top romantic antics between the toxic Big and Carrie. I always thought she should have ended up unattached and back in New York with her friends.
But in its three seasons, “And Just Like That” has not shown much interest in Carrie counting on her friends instead of a man, as she went from grieving one man (the deceased Big) to clinging to another (her longtime ex Aidan), while Seema has, if she had any discernible plot, continued to pursue a happily-ever-after. Meanwhile, the women have been so busy with their work and romantic or family lives that they have barely ever been together. Unlike the original series, “And Just Like That” did not center the women’s friendships, and suffered for it. Perhaps it wouldn’t be realistic for particularly the characters with husbands and kids still at home to be flitting off to brunch with friends, but this show was hardly concerned with realism in any other way. And, in fact, Carrie seemed to hate Miranda whenever they were together this season, a tension that remained unacknowledged and unresolved. I was particularly disappointed that the final half hour failed to unite at least the original three women — Carrie, Charlotte and Miranda — for a nice Thanksgiving moment together.
So what, if anything, was “And Just Like That” about? Carrie grieved Big, and dragged out a once-again-revived relationship with Aidan that mainly proved that he was awful. Miranda expanded her sexuality at midlife, which is interesting. But her relationship with the unfunny nonbinary comedian Che Diaz (Sara Ramirez) destroyed the confident and grounded Miranda we all loved from the original series, and the character never fully recovered. Nothing of consequence really happened to Charlotte in these three seasons, aside from a glancing struggle with her child coming out as nonbinary and her husband having mostly humorous cancer. And the women of color added to the cast — Seema, Lisa and the forgotten Dr. Nya Wallace (Karen Pittman) from the first two seasons — never quite came into their own, a waste of the actresses playing them.
Having written an entire book about “Sex and the City,” and having spent two decades defending it as a truly great and significant show, it has been painful for me to watch the reboot erode its legacy. I know many of my fellow fans have felt the same, as this series became an outlet for our rage week after week. But this is the chance we take when we keep tapping the well of nostalgia with works that have nothing new to say, no animating principle that makes them vital in the moment.
“And Just Like That” could have redefined how we see women over 50 the way that “Sex and the City” redefined singlehood during its original run, but it too often made the characters pathetic or turned them into jokes. It also often, as many fan rants have pointed out, simply didn’t make sense and lacked attention to detail. During this season in particular, this relationship began to feel truly toxic.
I had the strangest feeling watching those delightful final moments of Carrie looking truly joyful alone in her house. I could see the Carrie spark back in Sarah Jessica Parker’s performance after she spent so much of these three seasons mourning Big or moping about Aidan, and I thought, This could be the beginning of a great show.
That’s what this show does to me, and to so many of us. We keep wanting to watch, hoping for something better that never manifests. I will miss it, this perpetual hope, and the bonds I could instantly form with fellow fans by complaining about “And Just Like That.” But it is really, really, really time to say goodbye.
