The Problem With the <em>Sex and the City </em>Sequel<em> </em>Is Clearer Than Ever

And just like that, And Just Like That… is back for its third season on HBO Max, the streaming platform that’s gone through almost as many branding changes as Samantha Jones has lovers. And, much like the relationship between Sex and the City and its fatigued revival/sequel series, things still feel similar, yet different this time around—sometimes eerily so. The new season, which premieres on Thursday night, opens with the patron saint of “West Village girls,” Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), sitting and writing, as she is wont to do, by a window. The space she’s in looks somewhat similar to the iconic studio apartment she gave up at the end of Season 2, down to the coffee table and the walk-through closet. But then, as she dons a pink tulle coat to go with the pink tulle dress she’s wearing (apparently to go to the post office?!), we get the reveal: Carrie is actually in her new townhome in Manhattan’s pricey Gramercy Park neighborhood, complete with tasteful wall moldings, custom floor inlays, a state-of-the-art alarm system, and a sweeping staircase that connects its two grand levels. Long gone are the days when our girl was using the oven as a place to store sweaters and had less than $1,000 in her savings account.

Carrie’s new digs, alongside other changes this season, illustrate the key problem with And Just Like That… With the departures of the “queer nonbinary Mexican Irish diva” podcast host Che (Sara Ramírez) and Nya Wallace (Karen Pittman), the Columbia Law School professor who befriended Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) ostensibly out of pity, AJLT has now lost its only two vaguely middle-class characters. (Not to mention that their loss represents a step back for a show that was desperately trying to diversify itself, although thankfully we still have plenty of facetime with Sarita Choudhury’s glamorous realtor Seema Patel.)

Three seasons in, AJLT is firmly and unabashedly a show about some of the wealthiest women in New York and their trivial rich-people problems. If SATC was once a revolutionary show about sex and dating, AJLT is now too often a series about money and the carefree lifestyle that wealth provides the leisure class. Certainly, these characters aren’t facing the same problems they were several decades ago—nor do we expect them to. They’re older now, more settled, and dealing with teenage children or widowhood. But I, like other viewers, find myself coming back to these beloved characters out of obligation and curiosity, not for any real excitement or wonder. In its third season, AJLT is more content than ever plodding along (albeit in Manolos) as little more than a pedestrian fantasy that’s lost most of the spunk and spark of the original series. Like its characters’ lives, AJLT is just … comfortable.

The series isn’t the only TV show to center on the well-moneyed, to be sure. HBO Max alone has, in recent years, given us The White Lotus, Succession, Industry, Hacks, The Other Two, and a Gossip Girl reboot. But those shows—save for that last one, perhaps—have something pointed to say about their wealthy characters and their glitzy lifestyles. Conversely, in AJLT, money is simply the backdrop that enables our heroines to enjoy a series of fabulous if mundane adventures. In the six episodes of this new season made available to critics, for example, fans can expect such thrilling storylines as Charlotte (Kristin Davis) having to search for a new dog walker because of Upper East Side gossip, as well as trying to hire a cutthroat college admissions guide to get daughter Lily (Cathy Ang) into an Ivy League school. Carrie, meanwhile, spends much of the season pining over a designer dining table, relandscaping her garden, or trying to replace a pane of antique glass. She’s already had to wait six months for fabric for her chaise longue, she tells us. The horror!

Oddly enough, AJLT now feels closer not to SATC, but to HBO’s period show The Gilded Age. The two series sharing Nixon as a star aside, both are escapist soaps where fashion is paramount, and not much else happens besides a few romances. (Last season, The Gilded Age opened with a thrilling montage of Easter hats, while this season AJLT serves up a medley of Carrie walking in dozens of high heels that terrorize her downstairs neighbor, set to the song “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’.”) Still, at least the upstairs-downstairs nature of The Gilded Age means that the show has to, at a minimum, pretend to care about its poorer servant characters before treating us once again to the prettier rich-lady costumes. It’s a balanced diet, while AJLT is all sugar all the time. In one scene this season, Charlotte wears a massive string of pearls while her friend Lisa Todd Wexley (Nicole Ari Parker) wears a jacket dripping in pearls from practically every seam. “They’re having a pearl-off!” I said to no one in particular.

Were these characters always so self-involved? (I already know the answer.) Carrie is, of course, the textbook embodiment of “main character syndrome,” so it’s not that surprising to see her treat her downstairs neighbor with such disdain, equating the idea of walking around her timber floors while not wearing heels to having her feet amputated. She also spends significant chunks of time obsessing over the meaning of a thumbs-up emoji from her on-again, off-again boyfriend Aidan (John Corbett). “I don’t want to seem ridiculous. His family’s in crisis and I’m obsessing about an emoji,” she says in one small, blessed flash of self-awareness.

The best parts of this season come when Carrie decamps to Virginia to visit Aidan on his farm, leaving behind the trappings and trapdoors of big-city life. Despite the two being in love, Aidan moved back there at the end of Season 2 to live with his teenage sons, one of whom is going through a particularly rough period. He had asked Carrie for a five-year pause in their relationship—a freeze that initially stifles any real plots for Carrie this season. But once they reconnect properly, we see a newer side to Carrie. Fans of SATC will recall how Carrie behaved like a brat when she had to be dragged by her designer heels to Aidan’s upstate New York cabin in Season 4’s “Sex and the Country.” This time, though, she’s more serene and just seems happy to be with him. Hell, she even rides an ATV at one point. Watching Carrie interact with Aidan’s sons is moving, not just because it’s a side of her we haven’t seen before, but also because she’s genuinely deferential (maybe for the first time ever?) to his family. One tense dinner, in particular, stands out because of her poise.

It’s in these scenes that Carrie shows real growth and a wisdom that can only come with age, which feels like when AJLT comes closest to its raison d’être. It’s rare to see women in their 50s and 60s explored on television, with their still-in-flux lives proof that they’re not completely dead and settled yet. What do you do with your life, like Carrie, when your partner dies just as you’re entering your autumn years? Or how should you navigate, like one character has to this season, a troubling health diagnosis for a loved one?

“I loved everything as it was, but now that’s all changed, so I don’t know what comes next,” Carrie tells a landscaper about her garden, in words that could apply to both her life and AJLT itself, at its best and most urgent.

“That’s exciting—not knowing,” he tells her. “Because then what is meant to be has the space to show up.”

Yet, just like Carrie sitting at her computer and staring out her bedroom window, I couldn’t help but wonder … what if this show aimed this high all the time? What if the scales tipped away more often than not from the pretty in favor of this ugly side of life? What if, instead of fantasy, AJLT leaned even further into the reality that it’s so good at touching on, in the rare moments that it dares to?

Maybe it’s a me problem. Maybe I’m misreading the audience here. Maybe what we’re all craving in these dark times is a trifling distraction about ladies who lunch. Lord knows that I will keep tuning in, and probably will until each of these characters is sent off in an understated coffin topped with tasteful, all-white flowers. “I cannot look away,” Miranda says this season of some low-culture TV show she’s come to embrace against her better nature. “I’ve finally discovered the joy of hate-watching.” You and me both, Miranda.

Get the best of movies, TV, books, music, and more.