Is 'And Just Like That'... Actually good now?

In the third season premiere of And Just Like That…, late-in-life lesbian Miranda Hobbes picks up a timid, grey-haired woman named Mary at a bar. The morning after, still entwined in freshly laundered hotel bed sheets, Mary reveals that she’s a virgin. And not only that, but the Virgin Mary—who, and I can’t stress this enough, is played by Rosie O'Donnell—is also a nun. Sharing the news in the chic kitchen of Carrie Bradshaw’s new Gramercy townhouse, Miranda delivers a line that could only come from the Sex and the City-verse: “After you left the bar, I had sex with a nun.”

In the following episode, Miranda gets hooked on an algorithm-friendly queer dating show and declares over brunch that she’s “finally discovered the joy of hate-watching.” A season or two ago, I would have found this joke a little bit too on-the-nose, because for me—and a lot of other people on the internet—AJLT used to fit into that category. As someone who owes a decent percentage of my personality to Sex and the City and would, for reasons I don’t quite understand, take a bullet for NYC’s most delusional sex columnist, watching the reboot has often been a conflicting and traumatising viewer experience. But having seen most of season 3, I’m happy to report that it marks a turning point. The show has finally gone from being so-bad-it's-good to—dare I say it?—genuinely, actually good.

This resurgence is partly down to practical changes. When the reboot began in 2021, we were introduced to a host of new characters, from Miranda's law professor Dr. Nya Wallace (Karen Pittman) to internet-breaking comedian Che Diaz (Sara Ramirez) to sultry realtor Seema Patel (Sarita Choudhury). But building a world for each of these new characters was time-consuming and ended up dragging the focus away from the trio of “OG” women. In Carrie’s universe, it’s a simple law of physics that everything implodes when she isn’t the centre of attention. Now, though, she is back to being the brightest star, with the other characters in her orbit.

The rebalancing of AJLT has been aided by the departure of Ramirez and Pittman. While it made sense to diversify Ms. Bradshaw’s world—we all remember the racist disaster that was Sex and the City 2—it felt a little too convenient (and vaguely tokenistic) when each of the women suddenly had a designated “minority friend” at her side. It also made the show quite crowded, with some of the new characters awkwardly slotted in or frustratingly under-explored.

This season’s slimmed-down cast means there’s more time to get to know Seema and Lisa Todd Wexley (Nicole Ari Parker) on a deeper level. When the latter’s longtime editor and collaborator, Grace, announces that she’s leaving to work with renowned director Steve McQueen, L-T-W finds herself questioning her own abilities, letting us see a more vulnerable, insecure side to her. And when Seema and Carrie take a road trip to Virginia—where Carrie constantly compares her minor relationship issues to Seema’s potentially life-altering career dilemma—the show asks: Is it really possible to start over after fifty? Now, the newbies have landed in a more authentic place, where they are no longer encumbered by the sense that they exist to atone for the franchise’s past.

Speaking of which, AJLT feels noticeably less afraid of its audience. In the previous two seasons—especially the first—it seemed like the show and its leads were constantly anxious about saying the wrong thing. Some might say this is an accurate representation of aging in an era of social media, but it also felt like a response to the wider reappraisal of SATC, which highlighted a lack of diversity on the show and a handful of clunky (or straight-up offensive) storylines. To rectify this, the show over-corrected. It became timid and lost much of the biting cynicism that made SATC a cultural phenomenon. I’m not sure whether it’s the departure of Che Diaz—a much-memed attention sponge whose very appearance in a scene would make me suddenly feel the root of every tooth in my clenched jaw—but the dialogue now feels snappier and more confident. The characters aren’t trying to be offensive, but they’re not asking for permission or forgiveness for saying The Thing that you’re perhaps not supposed to say, either.

From the start, another challenge faced by AJLT is that it has been haunted by the ghost of SATC. Fans were initially confronted by the glaring absence of Kim Cattrall as Samantha Jones. But the bigger problem is that, no matter how hard reboot has tried to carve out its own identity—or reflect the reality that, like real people, its characters are changing as they age—the show has been constantly compared to its predecessor. Not only is the original SATC inimitable, but a lot of fans seem to have a collective false memory that it was four women sipping cosmos and talking about their glamorous lives, when the reality was that they were almost always let down by men, and their feelings about being “single and fabulous” were complex. In season 3, however, the show seems to have thought more carefully about how to bring the best parts of SATC into Carrie’s new world, starting with the franchise’s most valuable currency: cringe.

In the original show, terrible hookups with weird strangers were a narrative device for exploring the micro-humiliations of seeking human connection. But in AJLT’s first two seasons, the cringe-o-meter was dialed up way too high. There is a difference between awkwardness for the sake of comedy or story, and feeling viscerally uncomfortable. Horrifying scenes like the one where Miranda gets finger-blasted by Che Diaz while Carrie pees into a peach Snapple bottle, or Charlotte mixing up two Black people at a dinner party, made the viewer experience feel almost masochistic, creating the feeling that we should be cringing for the show as a whole rather than the specific situation.

In season three, AJLT is getting closer to finding its cringe sweet spot. Don’t get me wrong, there are still some creaky storylines that don’t quite land. Anthony’s “hot fellas” bakery is where laughter goes to die. (And please, don’t even get me started on Carrie’s attempt at writing a novel set in 1846.) But overall, the show’s awkward moments mostly work on a character level now. Sparks (and glass shards) fly when Carrie spends time with Aidan and his troubled (evil) son in Virginia, where TV’s best-dressed narcissist finally learns how to put someone else first. (That doesn’t last long.) Miranda, who is used to excelling at everything, is terrible at being a single lesbian. She soon becomes a meme after a live media appearance goes disastrously wrong. And as Charlotte and Harry's teenage daughter explores polyamory, their own attempt at recapturing their youth ends with a pair of urine-soaked jeans and a hangover from hell.

Miranda’s night with Sister Mary is one of those classically ridiculous moments where the show makes us cringe with the characters. Soon, the joke evolves when it is discovered that Mary is not just a virgin, but also a New York virgin. “Sister Mary Tourist,” as Miranda dubs her, offers to meet at the Central Park carousel, before showing up at Times Square wearing a Wicked merch, clutching bags of candy from the M&M store. “I don’t know which is worse,” Carrie says. “That you slept with a nun, or that you slept with a tourist.” This joke-within-a-joke feels reminiscent of SATC’s golden days, where the city and its indignities were a recurring character. And it taps into the original show’s classic sense of snarky superiority, too, like we’re once again watching the founding mothers of the Bradshaw-verse complain about their conquests over aspirationally expensive salads.

In a 2023 New Yorker profile that explored her career-defining role, Sarah Jessica Parker described herself a “bitter ender” when it comes to the characters she plays. And although no one’s paying me a $1-million-an-episode fee, that’s how I felt about Carrie, too. I had accepted that, no matter how deranged and indefensible this show got, I would be there until the end. But now, AJLT has become a noticeably less stressful viewer experience. It’s possible that I’m suffering from television’s version of Stockholm Syndrome, where Michael Patrick King is my captor, but there’s also a chance that season 3 is the moment where And Just Like That… finally found its stride. Just like that.


All images: Craig Blankenhorn

This article originally appeared on Harper'sBazaar.com

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