The crucial hits and major misses of And Just Like That

Warning: This article contains spoilers for the season finale of And Just Like That.

And Just Like That was always a little bit doomed.

How could it win? What could possibly satisfy us? It couldn't just be more Sex and the City, which was about four unmarried women trying to discover who they are and what they want in a place where they could hope to be or have anything imaginable. Those women are gone! That city has changed!

It couldn't just be 10 episodes of smug married life and designer footwear, either, however. No, the comfortable would feel too obvious and the absurd would feel too contrived. But And Just Like That bravely went forward, even without Kim Cattrall's Samantha Jones, and the world watched every week, ready to respond with new memes about how much everyone hated Che Diaz.

Now the first season (unclear if there will be more) has come to an end, and we're left to pick up the pieces of 10 truly confounding episodes of television. What did we hate? What did we tolerate? Read on for our hits and misses from the revival.

MISS: Time???????????

First of all, And Just Like That does not happen in reality. Let's just make that clear right away. For approximately 40 minutes a week, we put on our cosmo-colored glasses and entered a brave new world that only superficially resembles our own (where there is still a pandemic!), or even that of the original Sex and the City. And one of the most disorienting features of the Carrieverse 2.0 was its absolutely baffling negotiation of time.

Maybe this had to do with the episodes being longer than the original series', which were tight half-hours spent zipping between the four women, their stories at various degrees of gravity or absurdity but connected by Carrie's voiceover, always pondering a new question about sex, the city, what have you. But now there are no unifying episode questions (only cutesy closers) and no clear timeframe for when anything took place. Episodes felt lingering, but storylines that needed more attention seemingly vanished into thin air (promptly dropping alcoholism???). Don't get me started on the show's maddening use of ellipsis, cruelly deployed when our heroines have meet-ups in the glamorous foreign metropolises of Paris, France, and Cleveland, Ohio.

We realize in the finale that the whole season took place over the course of one year, and I can't begin to guess how much of that time was just the seasons-changing montage while Carrie wrote her grief memoir and how much of it was the actual action of And Just Like That, so wonky was the pacing. This show had a rhythm that nobody could dance to.

HIT: Killing Mr. Big

Wow, yes, I said this — and not only because, soon after the series premiered, Chris Noth was accused by multiple women of sexual assault (he has denied the allegations against him). No, even simply from the standpoint of the experience of watching this show, it was clear that Big had to die. For one thing, it had started to feel embarrassing to refer to him as "Big" anymore. That was a codename from when we were watching a show interrogating contemporary ideas about womanhood and romance, which we are not anymore; we learned John's real name in the series finale because he had officially been downgraded from elusive aspirational dream to plain old real-life middle-aged man (congrats).

The point is, Big was always more compelling as a concept than as a romantic partner. This was never more evident than during his and Carrie's excruciating happy-at-home scene in the And Just Like That premiere, during which their marital banter felt even more stagey and performative than their flirtations at Carrie's most insecure. Seeing them actually, functionally together felt foreign and even unpleasant. And furthermore — Carrie's meeting him kicked off Sex and the City; it is perfectly symmetrical and right that her losing him launched And Just Like That. The man had to die. That Peloton saw its opening, and it took it.

MISS: Atoning for its sins

Despite having been ahead of its time in many ways, it's true that Sex and the City, which premiered in 1998, was not up to 2022 standards regarding representation of race, gender, or sexuality. It's clear that the And Just Like That creative team wanted to correct this. But with only 10 episodes to work with — and more than that, many years of significant cultural shifts to make up for — they unfortunately could not introduce characters representing a broader experience of race, gender, and sexuality in ways that felt organic or true. No, first the show punished itself with multiple humiliations for a hopelessly out-of-touch Miranda, then it rushed in a new POC BFF for each of the lead characters, who engaged with their main-cast counterpart in a way that explicitly illuminated their cultural experience. The intention was clearly very pure, but there's no way around how forced it felt.

HIT: Seema!

Okay, I loved her! For a show that was so much about the power of female friendship, Sex and the City really neglected to ignite brand-new ones and allow them to blossom before us. And Just Like That gave us this! And though Sarita Choudhury's fabulous realtor did represent Carrie's share of the unfortunately transparent each-lead-gets-a-sidekick-of-color initiative, she was a wholly worthy addition to Ms. Bradshaw's life — and deserved a better introduction.

MISS: Digital Samantha

So much has already been written about how desperately we need Samantha, and yet here I am, undeterred by my own redundancy. In a seminal 2013 essay, New Yorker critic Emily Nussbaum broke down the four leads "mapped along three overlapping continuums" of their emotional, ideological, and sexual selves. Taking an admittedly less sophisticated approach, I have always thought of them as representing the four elements: Carrie is air, Charlotte is water, Miranda is earth, and who could possibly represent fire but Samantha f---ing Jones? Unfortunately, for reasons we are all too familiar with at this point, Samantha existed only in Carrie's phone and in our imaginations (elementally speaking, those are air spaces). Simply put, And Just Like That had no fire (though Seema heroically did her best!), and I think we all know why.

HIT AND MISS: Che Diaz

I acknowledge that this is controversial. As we know, pretty much nothing and nobody in recent memory has more thoroughly missed the mark than Che Diaz, conceptually or comedically. But has anyone or anything brought us all together so well, either? Who could have guessed, when this show premiered, that Miranda would leave a partially deaf Steve for a nonbinary podcasting stand-up comedian with exactly one (1) joke, which is just narrow variations of "be yourself," and that this person would approach actual household-name status based on how completely, how profoundly they disrupted our collective appreciation of Sex and the City? It's a pretty astonishing feat, if you ask me. And in the kooky, surreal bio-dome of And Just Like That — which, lest we forget, we were all inexplicably compelled to keep watching — it counts as a strange sort of victory as much as it does a horror.

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