And Just Like That... I Disliked the Show

Sex and the City has a new show, And Just Like That, but it's honestly not all that.

And Just Like That first aired on December 21 on HBO, and I was excited when I first heard of it. I just finished watching Sex and City and fell in love with Kim Cattrall’s character, Samantha Jones, and Miranda and Steve’s relationship. But after watching the first two episodes of Just Like That, my two favorite things began to dwindle.

*Spoiler Alert Ahead*

So, let’s be real. Sex and the City is a fun, sexy, and dramatic show, but I don’t think the show needed a sequel. The movies were okay, but they didn’t capture the witty spirit of the series, and the new show radically transformed the characters to fit into a modern and woke society.

A Google reviewer, EL, typed, “I keep watching the next episode hoping for something good, but each week is worse than the one before. And frankly, I am done. The show is a comeback of all that is wrong with our society. Trying to squeeze in as much wokeness as possible in a revival, whilst giving the viewers NO REAL PLOT.”

I’m sure some of us expected to view the group living their best lives, but due to the lack of writing, the nostalgia gets lost in the producer’s “woke” agenda. The characters seem as if they had arrived in a new city without a sense of how the world works.

Not only does Miranda fail to function as a normal human being in class, but the girls keep pressing that their age is the reason why everything goes wrong in their lives. Sure, they may have come off as immature in the previous show, Sex and the City, but they were in their early 30s (some people mature late). Now in their 50s, the writers fail to develop the characters and continue to put them in stupid situations.

The constant need to push politics into a show that was flirty and freeing has turned into something cringey and pathetic. There are ways to address important topics like COVID, Black Lives Matter, adoption, and gender identity, but throwing out words into the first 20 minutes without properly introducing each character just isn’t it.

The New York Times states, “All of these new characters could, in theory, be well-developed people with their own problems and inner lives… but they don’t pass the yet pass the racial Bechdel test. The whole production feels as if it speed-read ‘How to Be an Anti-racist’ in June 2020.”

The show is seven episodes in, and I can’t believe there are more to come. If the show were to have addressed a few social issues and treated each with respect and humor, the show would have seen different results. Instead, the audience is given multiple scenarios within one episode without properly addressing every problem.

Review: ☆