The Baffling Artistry of And Just Like That… Is Sorely Missed in Season 2

One time at a house party in college I ate a brownie from the fridge that, unbeknownst to me, contained psychoactive mushrooms. I later wandered the streets of Los Angeles in the dead of night, convinced I had teleported to an alternate parallel dimension in which I was comprised of soil and the earth comprised of me. This life-altering experience was still less of a mindfuck than watching the first season of Max’s Sex and the City revival And Just Like That….

I don’t say this lightly when I say that And Just Like That’s first season was a work of art. By “art” I, of course, mean that at times it felt akin to slipping into an early-career Dalí painting or, at its worst, being dunked head-first into Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ. Throughout my viewing, I found myself submerged in a state of utter stupefaction, as though this new check-in with some of TV’s most beloved Manhattanites was something I’d dreamt up thanks to too much NyQuil, only to sporadically be yanked back into reality by a wild attempt at cringe comedy or a tone-deaf quip about COVID, prompting me to scream at my TV, “What is happening!?”

There were plenty of reasons to not like And Just Like That, but for fans of the original such as myself, these largely stemmed from the show’s inability to decide on an identity that separated it from its originator. Compared to Sex and the City, the six-season sitcom that wavered in quality over the years but was nonetheless entertaining throughout, the new ten-episode miniseries’ very existence became a genie’s wish gone wrong. I couldn’t help but wonder: Why spend so much time showing us the quartet trio awkwardly grappling with the modern cultural and political landscape but then double down on each of their most spoiled, narcissistic qualities? Why stretch the runtime to a sloppy 45 minutes if those extra 15 are mostly filled with tepid pacing and shots of the beyond-charming Sarah Jessica Parker donning an expressionless grief face? Most importantly, why take the sex—nay, the fun—out of Sex and the City?

It was difficult to push those nagging questions aside and enjoy the revival for what it was, as its creators no doubt wished we all would. The ambition was to present post-menopausal Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), and Charlotte (Kristin Davis) reckoning with late middle age in a younger New York City, one far queerer and more diverse than Sex and the City would have ever had you believe. However, And Just Like That’s myopic preoccupations never strayed far from the city’s upper-upper-class echelon, thereby reinstating the original’s mythical attitudes toward New York City without genuinely engaging with its citizens’ widespread realities. Toss in the seemingly noble but too often squirm-inducing decision to assign each leading lady her very own Woman of Color Companion (WOCC)—Charlotte’s PTA friend Lisa (Nicole Ari Parker), Miranda’s law professor Nya (Karen Pittman), and Carrie’s much-needed Samantha replacement Seema (Sarita Choudhury)—and the whole shebang started to reek of an ill-conceived cash-grab.

It was all a glorious unbridled mess, deliriously daft yet also campy in the way things used to be camp before straight people discovered the aesthetic. It just didn’t work. But it was also so damn watchable. As the season rolled along, And Just Like That’s more perplexing character choices and plotlines began to solidify themselves as the series’s most fascinating draw. Half of the fun was also engaging with the social media discourse surrounding it, something that nary existed during Sex and the City’s original run, allowing the text to leap off the screen and intertwine itself with new and returning communities of viewers. This new iteration of the franchise was entrancing, allowing us to realize that these demented decisions in the writers’ room weren’t necessarily blunders: they were what gave the show an identity separate from Sex and the City but also from everything else on TV.

In an age in which the warm embers of nostalgia rule the multiplexes and increasingly find themselves dominating the small screen, And Just Like That’s refusal to either mimic the chutzpa of its original series or, as many of these contemporary “requels” would have done, cumbersomely pass the martini glass down to a new generation of thirty-something brunchaholics is rather commendable. The lack of Carrie’s trademark voiceover, the dissolution of anything remotely likable about Miranda’s character, Che Diaz’s audience consistently cracking up without a single funny punchline being told: The whole enterprise had a hypnotic, almost eerily uncanny feel to it, as though creator Michael Patrick King looked at the material and asked himself, “What if I made Sex and the City Lynchian?”

And just like that, I realized that And Just Like That… was a stroke of genius. Well, maybe not genius, but there was something so exquisite about “a new chapter” of a hallowed franchise that refused to either give its fans what they wanted in a revival or bring the out-of-touch characters into the 2020s in any meaningful way. It turns out that killing off Big and tanking a luxury workout equipment’s stock wasn’t even the ballsiest decision the showrunners made. It was taking the Park Avenue less traveled and producing a wry, quasi-Dadaist reimagination of the Sex and the City intellectual property and repurposing it as a post-postmodern commentary on the commodification of modern entertainment, the daunting prevalence of unrestricted capitalism masquerading as liberal feminism, and the ceaseless march of Time against the oppressive vacuousness of Death.

Well, maybe. More likely, I’m giving it way more credit than it deserves. Was it really so bad that it was good, or was it actually so good that we mistook it for bad?

So where does that leave us with Season 2? Well, viewers can rest assured: It’s better than the first. The actors are more committed, the storylines and relationships are more grounded without sacrificing their liveliness, and the show’s self-awareness is more apparent and enjoyable than before. A more tonally balanced and comprehensive glimpse into the fabulous lives of these fabulous women who have grown wearier with age but have not abandoned their hopes of a happily ever after, the season seems especially keen on rectifying the woes of the first. Notably, the premiere opens with each of our now six leading ladies getting busy with their current partners (aside from one character, who at least has a steamy scene from a Bridgerton knock-off to which to get her rocks off) to the tune of Elton John’s “Hold Me Closer,” an apt choice: The song is also a nostalgia-soaked reboot of something that didn’t necessarily need a 2020s update. No matter. The key here is that the sex is back, baby!

Things pick up just a few weeks after the closing events of last season. Carrie has entered a strictly “exit-out-of-grief-sex” situationship with her podcast producer Franklin (Ivan Hernandez), Miranda is confidently going up to strangers at AA meetings and going down on Che (Sara Ramirez) in their Los Angeles bungalow, and Charlotte continues to navigate being a helicopter mom who refuses to go on autopilot. Thankfully, after the clumsy integration of their characters into the first season’s narrative, the trio’s WOCCs graduate from their supporting roles and earn their own compelling narrative arcs as well. Nya battles loneliness for the first time in her decades-long marriage, Lisa balances her filmmaking career with her motherly duties while facing the pressures of remaining “dignified” in the face of both her mother-in-law and everyday racism, and Seema (thank God for Seema) bulldozes through some fabulous flings without ever losing sight of what she brings to either the sexual or real estate market.