The second season of the Sex and the City reboot reaches for the tenor of its heyday but doesn’t always find solid footing. Photo: Craig Blankenhorn/Max
As a TV show, And Just Like That … is a pratfall. It’s all about humiliation, reviving Carrie Bradshaw and her clique of wealthy New York friends just to subject them to the indignities of the present moment. Sex and the City was all about humiliation too — each episode found new ways for Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda to trip themselves up — but it was precise and controlled. Carrie’s clumsy; Sarah Jessica Parker trained as a ballerina and does all of her own falling. But watching season one of the sequel series was like seeing someone accidentally twist their own ankle. The intentions were clear, as the show tried to critique the original’s blindness about race and class and introduce a bevy of non-white characters. We got a fumblingly woke Miranda torching her marriage to Steve (poor Steve!), no Samantha, and, of course — most hilarious and painful of all — “Hey, it’s Che Diaz.” Season two seems more aware of the joke, of what it’s subjecting its characters to, and of the existing conversation around the show. As it goes along, it starts to establish a rhythm, however offbeat, while occasionally throwing out a situation outrageous enough to melt down the internet for a week. (Che’s sitcom is called Che Pasa.) As a stunt, it’s better executed with cleaner technique. But that also means there’s less bruising involved, which, if you’re watching for the blood sport, is a little less fun.
That’s also because the reboot’s second season is working hard to model itself more closely after the original seasons of Sex and the City. In SATC, Carrie’s voice-over provided the pun-based thematic sealant for each episode, something that never seemed more essential than when it was missing from the first season of And Just Like That … Without Carrie’s narration, the show itself felt aimless and adrift, unsure of how to weave together its many different threads. (According to creator Michael Patrick King, evoking a feeling of confusion was the goal of eliminating the voice-over in the first place, but as with so much of AJLT, the execution lands a crosstown block away from the intention.) Now, the voice-over is back, but just barely: Each episode ends with Carrie announcing, “And just like that …,” followed by a brief thesis. It gives you the cozy, comforting feeling of forward momentum, summing up episodes that, thanks to the expanded cast, now run near 45 minutes apiece and overflow with B- and C-plots.
There are other, more SATC-like aspects of the show now, too, specifically the emphasis on sex and relationships: Carrie fumbles back into the dating pool while attempting to move on after Big. Miranda tries a strap-on, and Charlotte worries about Harry’s ability to come. The new characters sleep around, too, with Seema’s affair with a guy who needs a penis-enlarger and Nya’s marriage continuing to crumble. The show crescendos into some wild slapstick situations, though sadly nothing nearing the highs of the original series’ “funky spunk” heyday or even the season-one AJLT scene in which Carrie pees into a bottle while Miranda gets fingered. The seven episodes sent to critics — we’re in for an 11-episode season, if you’re wondering — pull in some members of the larger Sex and the City universe with appearances from Candice Bergen’s former Vogue editor, who has taken a buyout and started an influential newsletter, as well as the much-hyped return of John Corbett’s Aidan. He appears only in one episode, and despite my hope that Carrie would briefly revisit her past and then decide to move on, it seems as though he’ll be sticking around.
All that nostalgia will presumably lead to a brief, heavily-managed, single-scene appearance from Kim Cattrall as Samantha, which feels like the logical outcome for a series that has decided that, in order to move forward, it will look back to an older, better version of itself. From the start, Samantha’s absence has been the obvious hole in And Just Like That …, which gets a lot of its tone issues from the fact that none of its main characters are having fun with their lives in the same way Samantha could. (Among the new characters, Seema remains the most vivacious but is also freighted with anxiety about trying to find a man and settle down.) I doubt that bringing Cattrall back for a cameo appearance will right the ship as much as make it clear that And Just Like That … is still lacking an essential ingredient that could turn it into something as strong as the original series — unless, under the Zaslav IP-based regime, Max (née HBO Max) sends enough truckloads of cash to Cattrall that she agrees to make regular appearances in a third season. Even then, we all know too much about her relationship with her former co-stars now to make any onscreen chemistry believable.
And so AJLT’s second season gives you the strange sensation of seeing something try to return to an equilibrium it doesn’t actually have the means to reestablish. And in looking backward, it underemphasizes the new dynamics where the writing is most secure. The show has really keyed into its understanding of Charlotte; Kristin Davis, as in the first season, persists in her character’s attempts to be the perfect progressive mother to her kids while falling prey to her more knee-jerk conservative impulses. Although their scenes are often underwritten, Chris Jackson gives the best performance on the show as the tryhard but bumbling husband to Nicole Ari Parker’s Lisa Todd Wexley. And to be fair, whatever is going on with Che and Miranda — and with Sara Ramirez and Cynthia Nixon’s utter lack of chemistry — remains fascinating. They spend time together in L.A. and bicker while trying to figure out pegging. We see more of Che’s comedy, which is as hack as ever (jokes about how everyone in L.A. uses Uber too much!). Back in New York, Che gets an apartment in Hudson Yards, the funniest place you could have a supposedly revolutionary genderqueer character live. There is even a scene in which they get feedback on their pilot from a nonbinary Brooklynite. It goes about as well as you’d expect, though it’s also a gambit to make you feel for Che, seeing them as more than a meme. I can’t say it succeeds.
Does And Just Like That … get how absurd those plotlines are? Are its characters pointedly oblivious or accidentally so? Is its tone messy and confusing because getting older is messy and confusing, or is it just a confusing mess? In each case, the answer falls somewhere between “yes” and “no.” And Just Like That … is mesmerizing in that wobbliness. Watch one episode and the show seems like it’s collapsing. Watch another and it looks as if it’s about to right itself. It never does either — never stops moving long enough to become any one thing. The instability is both the point and the problem, the thing that makes you want to watch and cringe at it simultaneously. It’s poignant, even. And Just Like That … is both in on and outside of the joke, but either way the sight of someone falling makes you laugh.
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