‘And Just Like That’ bubbles to a close

After 27 years of TV, movies, and TV once again, the other shoe drops on the 'Sex and the City' franchise

As I’ve written a time or two over the years, I always had a strange and love/hate relationship with Sex and the City.

The show began in 1998, at a time when I was a college student and didn’t have HBO, but it really became a big part of my life around the year 2000, when moved to New York.

I lived in that city for the next five years, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that every woman I dated or was even acquainted with in my New York years was obsessed with the show, and often eager to visit all the restaurants, bars, and other night spots that were featured on the show.

I distinctly remember one girlfriend sharing that she was happy, like Miranda, to be dating “a sensitive guy named Steve.” Though ironically, I ended up marrying a woman who is both a non-New Yorker and someone who claims to have never seen Sex and the City.

Also in those years, I stumbled into scenes being filmed on several occasions (I was present for the filming of the infamous scene where Samantha confronts a trans woman on the streets of the Meatpacking District).

It’s just one of those things that happen in New York; such “these pretzels are making me thirsty” events take place all the time.

Sex and the City never, at any point, pitched itself as a how-to guide for how to live as a young woman in New York City, but a lot of girls in those days saw it that way.

The show was often corny, tended to luxuriate in wealth, while exaggerating the sort of lifestyle available to someone living in Manhattan as a writer. There’s a lot of stuff throughout the series that hasn’t aged especially well.

But it had a certain charm, and made me care about the characters, and there’s no doubt that the show helped put HBO on the map. I can acknowledge that the show wasn’t meant for me, but I got into the habit of watching it, and I’ve probably seen almost every episode of the original series.

The original Sex and the City went off the air in 2004. There were two movies- a decent one in 2008, and 2010’s Sex and the City 2, the one where they go to Abu Dhabi, which is one of the worst movies of all time.

But that second one did inspire some fantastically funny reviews, including Lindy West’s famous description of the show as “a home video of gay men playing with giant Barbie dolls.” That the characters on SATC acted more like gay men than straight women was a fairly old critique of the show, but that was a wonderful turn of phrase.

The franchise took more than a decade off, and then came And Just Like That, a reboot that arrived in 2021 for the then-new HBO Max streaming service. The big news was that Kim Cattrall — thanks to a blood feud with Sarah Jessica Parker — did not return, nor did original creator Darren Star, nor Patricia Field, who designed the costumes. Although Cattrall and Star did both participate in Happy Clothes, a documentary last year about Field.

The first season did what a lot of shows were doing in 2021, post George Floyd: Addressing racism, and the undeniable fact that the original show always presented New York City through the eyes of wealthy white women. And like most other shows around that time, it handled this in a way that was extremely clumsy and didn’t end up making anyone happy.