What we love, lose, and answer with the first season of And Just Like That
By Marie Johnson
Charlotte (left) with Carrie (back right) and Miranda (right) sitting around a table in a restaurant talking// photo: HBO
At 13, I would mindlessly watch E! reruns of Sex and the City. Given it was on basic cable, most of the illicit conversations or scenes were censored. It was not until several years later with a premium cable subscription that I got the fullness of the show and its many delights. I, like many others, enjoyed the story’s beats, frankness, and every so often mocked Carrie’s (Sarah Jessica Parker) refrain where she “couldn’t help but wonder” about the many situations in her life. It introduced a world I was nascently entering, and these characters reflected a number of concerns I had as I navigated dating which was seemingly embanked in contradictory rules and scores of minor humiliations.
In her essay “The Difficult Women of Sex and the City”, writer and film critic Emily Nussbaum writes about the show’s cultural history. She notes how it had been routinely dismissed during its advent since the series was promoted at the turn of the new millennium, an era when a flurry of prestige dramas like The Sopranos came spilling forth. And in the same way that Tony Soprano was the empathetic anti-hero, a paradigm of how lonely white men viewed themselves, Carrie, Samantha (Kim Cattrall) , Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), and Charlotte (Kristin Davis) were anti-heroes in their own right. As Nussbaum mentions, Sex and the City allowed for their characters to transform which was not normal in half hour sitcoms at the time. Nussbaum challenges the reader to relitigate its cultural relevance. Given how monumental the show is, she begs the question, why is it “so often portrayed as a set of empty, static cartoons, an embarrassment to womankind?”
Sex and the City is not the only cultural artifact subject to this particular public debate. As American society reckons with past and current misogyny in media, discourse about the reception of the characters has shifted back and forth. There were plenty of critiques of how Carrie was a bad friend or how the show should have centered Samantha, but with And Just Like That, the 2021 reboot, a number of commenters have a renewed appreciation and have wondered whether the characters have ultimately diverted from their early characterizations in Sex and the City.
As I watched SATC, I found myself relating to Carrie’s selfishness, admiring Samantha’s willingness to go after her desires, and envying Charlotte's optimism. But mainly, I identified with Miranda’s approach to life. I, alongside plenty of women, identified as a Miranda girl. And my appreciation for her did not feel particular to me, especially in 2018, with the aftermath of the Trump presidency, Miranda was the “It Girl”, and the writers of And Just Like That took notice.
Initially, when we meet Miranda in And Just Like That, she is back in school to get her master’s degree in Human Rights at Columbia. On her first day, she accidentally insults her professor, Nya, and then continues to have awkward run-ins. There is a differentiation between the life Miranda has lived and the realities she and many others have come to face in the aftermath of the summer of 2020. These run-ins don’t translate to shared reciprocity with Nya (Karen Pittman) until a man in a Chucky costume attempts to steal her purse and Miranda is able to retrieve it for Nya. This isn’t the only type of learning Miranda receives nor is this the Miranda people have come to expect when watching Sex and the City. One of the discoveries we are introduced to in the show is that Miranda has a drinking problem. Being isolated and stressed during this ongoing pandemic, Miranda represented one of the many who used drinking to cope. Miranda’s behavior comes to head when a book about quitting drinking appears at her doorstep, and realizes she does not remember ordering it. When she quits drinking, she no longer allows alcohol to anesthetize herself to the many decisions she has made throughout her life. We get a glimpse of this ennui when she makes ice cream sundaes with Steve. The camera pans over to her look of dissatisfaction with her life.
I was asked whether I thought Steve (David Eigenberg) and Miranda were endgame at the end of Sex and the City. I said no. It was the answer I arrived at, but not one I initially held. They both grew in their relationship. Miranda always presented a hard line pragmatism, and Steve was her opposite. Throughout the seasons, Steve learned to hold his own a little more confidently, and live less like an adultified child while Miranda was more openly vulnerable. It was a push and pull dynamic where Miranda thought ahead, and Steve always managed to ground her and take in the moment. It was a relaxed, true partnership. While Carrie and Charlotte often had men cater to them and their needs, Miranda and Steve’s relationship, on the other hand, was a refreshing contrast to the material and aspirational relationships that the rest of the girls entertained. They worked together and faced real issues with the comfort of intimacy. They demonstrated an emotional tenor that most people hoped to achieve in their own relationships.
When Steve cheated in the first Sex and the City movie, I asked when will their relationship end? And Just Like That answered that question while introducing a number of new ones as these characters were forced to navigate a number of new situations. While this series had moments with all the three remaining women, it became noticeable that Miranda transformed the most.
There is not a preeminent focus on romance and sex in this reboot. When we are introduced to Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte, they are navigating a world that is a lot less white and straight, leaving them a lot more uncertain about the future. For Carrie, helping her navigate this transition is Che (Sara Ramirez), a comedian who has a vape affixed to their person at all times. With the lack of romantic entanglements in the show, the most prominent romantic connection is the one brewing between Miranda and Che. Miranda has become the main character, and there are several visual rejoinders in this show that prove this. She not only lets go of her pragmatic attitude, but she also acts as selfishly as Carrie did in her relationships in Sex and the City. Che is approachable but aloof, and Miranda has become enamored with them. Their romance is a build of tension, beginning with Miranda rightly telling them off for giving her teenage son pot to tequila-drunk fingering in Carrie’s kitchen.
During Miranda and Che’s kitchen hook-up scene, Carrie ends up peeing the bed while waiting for Miranda’s help. Miranda is in the throes of passion, and it is a visual parallel to a scene in Sex and the City. In season 4 episode 7, Miranda accidentally falls in her bathroom after straining her neck. She cannot move and calls Carrie for her help. Carrie sends Aiden in her stead, and when Carrie attempts to apologize to Miranda for sending Aiden, she redirects the conversation back to her and Aiden, making her apology hollow. She is caught up in her boyfriend when she was supposed to be helping a friend in their time of need. In another scene, later in the season, Miranda drops in at Che’s place, and this scene shares the same visual beats as when Carrie drops by Big’s(Christopher Noth) place after he tells her he is moving to France.
After hooking up with Che, she attempts to recreate that moment with Steve. She becomes annoyed by the triteness of the encounter, and shoots him a disparaging glare. Everything beyond Che is irritating.
After their first encounter, Miranda does not hear from Che for weeks, and their excuse for not reaching out or responding is that they were probably very high. Miranda’s courtship with Che is hot and cold. They hook up again, and Miranda admits she loves them in a sex and pot-induced haze. At a pride event, Miranda cowers after seeing her son Brady in the crowd which prompts her to eventually admit to Che she is not in an open relationship and has been cheating on Steve. With Che, while exciting, Miranda is not fully sure where she stands.
The imbalance in their connection reaches a peak when Miranda freaks out at the doorstep of Che’s apartment. She unexpectedly arrives at Che’s apartment with cookies. Miranda seems to surprise herself with her ability to conjure romance, but when she breaks down this moment, seemingly looking at herself from a bird’s eye view, she freaks out, running out of the apartment and verbalizing where she went wrong out loud. Miranda surprises herself by who she is becoming.
Miranda always seemed to be the beacon of a no-nonsense approach to life. Sex and the City made it easy to empathize with her need to always be right and in control. As I rewatched the show, I came to understand that this behavior was a mechanism to deal with her pain. She was a person who complained when brunch conversations were overtaken by the discussion of the various men each of them dated, but the audience watched her hide when she saw her first love in the street in the beginning of season 2. The sort of knowingness Miranda coveted never inured her to pain. She was a human after all who failed and tried and tried again. It is a lesson we all eventually learn.
It was refreshing to see her not be reduced to a narrow, ever sensible Miranda, and she joins a long line of stories of women untangling at the seams when they explore their sexuality to its fullest extent. Mrs. Fletcher, one of the early casualties of HBO series cancellations, followed a woman who explores her sexuality after her son goes off to college. Diane Lane’s character in Unfaithful falls into a tumultuous affair, and Casual, the series spanning a mere four seasons, is an unruly yet sad testament to this type of unraveling. A lot of these stories buck against the notion of wisdom, a trite expectation foisted upon people as they age.
Kathleen Woodward, Lockwood Professor of English at the University of Washington, questions our use of the word wisdom when it is projected upon older people. She calls for us to have a new affect script for older people in our culture in Against Wisdom: The Social Politics of Anger and Aging. In her article, she argues that wisdom is a politicized term which conveys a notion of detachment. We tend to talk about wisdom as it relates to older people in a pejorative sense where “older people ‘naturally’ withdraw from their social roles to make their ultimate disappearance-death-less difficult for the smooth functioning of society. ” It is a term often employed to encumber rage instead of buttressing it. She states that as we age, “the emotions, or passions, need not inevitably diminish”and “emotional exercise” is crucial to our well-being.
And Just Like That addresses the characters’ reluctance towards becoming elders. In the fifth episode of the first season, Carrie’s reluctance to fully acknowledge her aging comes in the form of a hip injury. She deems her hip injury a congenital birth defect as opposed to a symptom of an aging body. In episode 6, she even flirts with the idea of plastic surgery. Her discomfort with this change is noticeable and eventually culminates in her obsession with her downstairs neighbor, a designer who stays up at all hours of the night, makes jewelry, and has public displays of rage directed towards her wayward boyfriend. She accepts that at one point she dealt with those particular turmoils, and realizes it is not what she wants afterall. Miranda, on the other hand, refuses to avoid the inevitable and is more representative of Woodward’s rage. Her anger is even what compels her to move forward to take the class with Nya. She is emotionally exploratory in a way that suggests this passion has been repressed for a long time. When she overcomes drinking, she opens up to new possibilities. Her age does not prevent her from acknowledging her faults nor prevents her from making life-changes for her own betterment.
The general chaos Miranda faces is both exciting for her own character arc but also extremely nerve-wracking. My own internal ache from watching Miranda on screen is palpable. Her story has pushed me to look at my own behaviors since I often romanticize minor encounters and regularly contemplate my own internal ageist bias. As someone who has grown tired of the dramatic highs and lows of Che-like instances, I can’t help but wonder whether this is all there is to look forward to.
There is something comforting about Woodward’s criticism of how we use the term wisdom. There is a moment and time where “natural withdrawal” allows a life existing beyond emotional tribulations. It may seem boring from the outset, but such predictability, those easy endings that promise happily ever after and so on, is desirable.
I am not alone in the desire for an easy ending. In “The Difficult Women of Sex and the City,” Nussbaum is not indifferent to the uncomplicated, sentimental conclusion. Carrie, the writers, and the audience could sigh a heavy breath of relief when Big rescues her in Paris. She questions what Sex and the City would look like if the show had ended with Carrie being surrounded by her friends. And Just Like That offers a makeshift answer, but it is too early to tell where it will go. The show has demonstrated that unpredictability, the many embarrassments we go through in dating, and the desires we have are never a privilege solely for the young but rather are lessons we continue to learn and relearn as we age.
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