‘And Just Like That…’ Goes Out With A ‘Bah’

Warning: Contains spoilers for Season Three of And Just Like That…, including the finale.

Just about two weeks ago, Michael Patrick King — showrunner of the Sex and the City sequel series And Just Like That… — made a big announcement: The show was ending with its current third season. The news came as a shock since, when the show was renewed for said third season, we were all told it was “the #1 Max Original overall.” (Could so much have changed in its switch back to being an HBO Max Original?!) King wrote in a statement that he and star Sarah Jessica Parker “held off announcing the news until now because (they) didn’t want the word ‘final’ to overshadow the fun of watching the season.” 

This watcher actually wasn’t having that much fun watching the season as it went on, though, and I doubt I was alone. As much joy as I got from the deeply self-referential Season Two, Season Three has been a slog, and an object lesson: You can’t please everyone.

The biggest gag of the second season was, indisputably, the return of Kim Cattrall — who, famously, declined to reprise her Sex and the City role as Samantha, but returned for the Season Two finale, seemingly on the condition that we all DEFINITELY KNEW that was going to be it for her. But the second-biggest was the return of Aidan (John Corbett), not just a longtime boyfriend for Parker’s Carrie during the original series but a sometime fiancé. With Carrie widowed and Aidan divorced, she impulsively writes him partway through Season Two, and the two meet for dinner on what turns out to be Valentine’s Day. When Carrie tries to end the night by asking him up to her apartment, Aidan seizes up, seemingly having a PTSD flashback to the worst times they spent there during their relationship and stating that, despite all the time that has passed, he cannot set foot in the dwelling again. 

Carrie accommodates him by suggesting a hotel, which turns out to be a harbinger of things to come: Carrie then accommodates his fear of her apartment by buying a house in another part of town for them to live in together; she accommodates his refusal to attend the farewell dinner party she holds in the old place. In the Season Two finale, Aidan’s troubled youngest son Wyatt (Logan Souza) acts out — in revenge for Aidan’s dating Carrie, Aidan believes — and gets in legal trouble. Aidan asks Carrie to make her biggest accommodation yet: Release him to look after Wyatt until he turns 18, five years hence, and go no-contact in the interim. Carrie agrees.

As the title of the original series suggests, sex has been an important part of Carrie’s life, so whether she was going to decide on celibate self-denial or casual hookups while she waits for Aidan, I believed interesting stories would come with either choice. But she kind of decides to do neither. 

Carrie violates Aidan’s no-contact boundaries with a moderately phony work trip to Virginia, where he lives, causing another angry, violent tantrum from Wyatt. She shrugs off Aidan’s confession that he slept with his ex-wife Kathy (Rosemarie DeWitt) because Carrie didn’t think either of them expected the other to remain chaste — which is how she learns Aidan intended to and expected her to be too. She endures multiple episodes’ worth of suspicion on Aidan’s part that she’s falling for the downstairs tenant, Duncan (Jonathan Cake). This one is especially challenging for the viewer, since we know their relationship is entirely innocent and also wish they WERE hooking up because he’s so hot. Meanwhile, whenever one of Carrie’s friends expresses the view that being with Aidan — which, strictly speaking, she mostly isn’t — seems to require her giving up a lot, she gets instantly defensive, including making preposterous statements like “Aidan and I are over 20 years in” as though they hadn’t broken up and married other people during that time. (“I don’t have fun,” Carrie acidly tells Miranda during the same fight — girl, we know!)

Worst of all, even though Carrie has made her name as a memoirist, Season Three finds her abstracting her feelings about Aidan by writing a novel set in the 19th century. We’re forced to hear her narrate excerpts in which her protagonist, only ever called The Woman, lives through experiences that mirror Carrie’s own. This storyline — fan service for the Aidan heads I assume must exist — isn’t just bad art that we have to watch; it’s also spawning bad art in the fictional realm.

Having closed the second season by losing two of AJLT’s new characters — Che (Sara Ramírez), a former romantic partner for Cynthia Nixon’s Miranda; and Nya (Karen Pittman), a law professor Miranda meets when she takes her class — one might have hoped Carrie’s friends might enjoy more screen time. But Carrie and Aidan’s drama took up so much oxygen that the rest still felt underserved. Harry (Evan Handler), husband to Charlotte (Kristin Davis), goes from wetting his too-tight jeans at a party to a diagnosis of prostate cancer in two episodes. (Handler is a cancer survivor, so I hope he, at least, is satisfied by how it came out.) New friend Seema (Sarita Choudhury) goes from high-flying real estate agent to what passes for penury in Manhattan (she has to let her driver go) back to success that somehow we don’t hear much about? 

The other remaining friend, documentary filmmaker Lisa (Nicole Ari Parker), flirts extensively with her sexy male editor Marion (Mehcad Brooks), but other than getting flustered by how hot he is, nothing comes of it. Oh, and if you assumed the many mentions of Michelle Obama as a possible subject in Lisa’s documentary about the first Black women in various fields meant we’d be getting a cameo in the finale: sorry, that would have made too much sense. (Maybe if AJLT were a Netflix original.) Making space for voices and experiences that were absent in the very white Sex and the City is a great idea, or would have been if they hadn’t so often felt tokenized. 

King’s statement suggests that ending the show now was his decision, and I have no reason to think that’s not true — apart from the many dangling plot threads and unsatisfying ending. Is Seema going to be okay with it if her boyfriend Adam (Logan Marshall-Green) really never does want to get married? What’s going to happen with Miranda’s son Brady (Niall Cunningham) and Mia (Ella Stiller), not his girlfriend but soon to be the mother of his biological child? With the season finale ending on Thanksgiving, contrivance has to keep nearly everyone apart for what was to have been a big dinner at Miranda’s? The show started laying the groundwork for it last week! 

That penultimate episode is also where King and his writers started laying the groundwork for Carrie’s ending: Her editor Amanda (Ashlie Atkinson) loves her novel, but says Carrie can’t leave The Woman alone in what would have been, for a woman in the 19th century, a tragedy. The parallels between Carrie and The Woman have been quite clear all along and remain so. Carrie isn’t with her husband, her ex-fiancé or her fling, but is that a tragedy? I wouldn’t have thought so if I could believe not only that Carrie still had her best friends, but also that the show thought those friendships were important. Instead, the final episode of And Just Like That… barely has Carrie interacting with most of her friends at all. Last season ended on Carrie and Seema lounging on the beach in Greece; their last interaction in the series finale is a pie handoff between cabs. 

I know real life is messy, and not every story gets an ending. But this isn’t real life. It’s HBO (Max). If this is how and where the sequel was going to drop all these characters — unceremoniously, and in the middle of some of their plotlines — it’s hard to know why anyone bothered to bring them back to us at all.