Part of the appeal, of course, is that we love these characters. We’re invested in their lives, even when those lives involve a series of nonsensical happenings, such as Lisa’s dad dying twice, or Carrie writing a novel about a 19th-century woman who’s having some sort of existential crisis (the latter is actually a very Carrie thing to do, to be fair). Had we not seen Sex and the City, we likely wouldn’t collectively be watching And Just Like That, which means that we’ve found ourselves in a never-ending bind: beholden to these characters while also watching something that resembles a choose-your-own-adventure game generated by AI.
You might assume that the aforementioned would stir up some kind of resentment—and maybe it did, at first. But as time’s gone on, I’ve found myself going full-circle and actually enjoying the weirdness of it all. Charlotte staying out until daylight hours, as if any club in Manhattan actually stays open until daylight hours. Carrie refusing to furnish her home. Aidan making Carrie sleep in an out-house in her clothes, like she’s been banished to a kennel, and her accepting that. There’s a reason that my colleague Rad and I have endless questions to unpack at the end of every episode, because the joy of And Just Like That is precisely in of all the questions (and the fact that they remain unanswered), rather than in spite of them.
I don’t know, maybe I’ve developed Stockholm syndrome, or maybe the internet has curdled my synapses, but now that I’ve finally let go of any expectations regarding And Just Like That as a SATC sequel, and instead begun to understand it as a surrealist comedy, of sorts, I’m kind of loving it? Bring on the next episode of absolute unbridled insanity—I can hardly wait.
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