Albert Einstein reportedly said that “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” Like many quotes commonly attributed to historical figures who have appeared in the Night at the Museum franchise, Einstein never actually said this. But to paraphrase another famous historical figure, Caroline Marie Bradshaw, I couldn’t help but think about that quote while watching this season of And Just Like That…, the oft-maligned Sex and the City reboot. Specifically, I couldn’t help but apply it to Che Diaz, the even-more-maligned love interest of Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon).
To sum up: when we meet Che in the first season of AJLT, we immediately learn five things about them, which they ennumerate in characteristically unsubtle fashion: they are nonbinary, Mexican-Irish, profoundly unfunny (a perhaps undesirable quality in an aspiring stand-up comedian/podcast host), and horny as fuck. They quickly hone their horny energy onto Miranda, the most cynical member of the SATC crew, who at this point is undergoing something of a midlife crisis, drinking lots of white wine, ordering random shit on Amazon, and avoiding sex with her husband, fan favorite Steve (David Eigenberg). After Che finger-bangs Miranda in Carrie’s kitchen, the two fall in love, even though Che pointedly tells Miranda they will never be able to commit to a real relationship with them — and by the end of Season One, the usually pragmatic Miranda flies to L.A. on a whim to live with Che while they shoot their sitcom pilot, in which their dad is played by an improbably zaddy-esque Tony Danza.
When AJLT premiered, fans universally loathed Che, for reasons as multitudinous as stars in the sky: they were cringey, they were unfunny, they didn’t make sense as a match for the always-sensible, heretofore staunchly heterosexual Miranda. None of these criticisms were wrong, per se, though as I wrote last year, they did somewhat miss the point of the character, which was to both serve as a corrective for SATC’s lily-white, largely hetero perspective and to show how these three privileged, self-absorbed Gen X-ers navigate a world of pronouns and vaginal dryness suppository podcast ads (both of which serve as major plot points at various times in the show).
These criticisms were also somewhat unfair to Ramirez’s performance, which is sexy and gutsy and strikes me as deeply personal to the actor, who, like Che, left their marriage to a man and came out as nonbinary shortly thereafter. Ramirez has never explicitly said Che was inspired by their own trajectory, but as I previously reported, an HBO source said they worked closely with AJLT‘s writers to develop the character, and it strikes me as both highly insensitive and unthoughtful for Che’s critics to completely disregard that. (It’s also worth noting, though perhaps uncharitable, that Ramirez appears to share Che’s tendencies to speak as if they’ve just swallowed the collected works of Judith Butler, if recent interviews with the actor leading up to this season are any indication.)
As a SATC superfan, and therefore a begrudging AJLT fan by default, my feelings about Che are somewhat more complicated. More than Ramirez’s portrayal itself, and more than Che being cringe (because wouldn’t it be less realistic for a polyamorous New York City-based aspiring comic to not be cringe?), I take offense to the fact that in the second season, AJLT‘s writers do not seem to be taking the audience’s criticism of Che particularly seriously. Because I am not joking when I say that there is more character development devoted to Che in the first three episodes of Season Two than over the entirety of Season One — up to and including their revelation that they were inspired to come out as nonbinary because they couldn’t stop shitting themselves. (I am not joking.)
Over the course of the first three episodes, we are treated to numerous details about their personal life that are treated as explosive revelations integral to the show, such as their struggles with body image, their continued relationship with their ex-husband, and their frustration with their showrunner BD (Abby McEnany, who, given only a few minutes of screen time, pulls off the rather staggering feat of managing to be more grating than Che). For comparison, the most we learn about Seema (the great Sarita Choudhury), another new character introduced to the SATC universe, in three episodes is that she has an unhealthy relationship with her hairdresser and really, really loves her Birkin bag.
Despite AJLT writer Samantha Irby’s claim last year that “one of the least charitable takes is that we’re [the writers] not in on some of the jokes the internet is making” about Che, that does indeed seem to be the case for the first few episodes of Season Two. Michael Patrick King and co. believe we are deeply invested in both Che’s inner life and Miranda’s happiness with them; otherwise, why devote so much time to developing a character that the internet has made it clear it deeply hates? To borrow the vernacular of nerds, it’s as if George Lucas read all the reviews for Phantom Menace, and still decided to center Attack of the Clones entirely around Jar Jar Binks.
Look, TV is not a charitable enterprise, and in theory, despite fandom Twitter’s attempts to convince us otherwise, works of art are under no obligation to pander to audience expectations, or even try to aspire to baseline standards of quality. But we are kidding ourselves if we think of AJLT as a work of art (even though I personally disagree that it’s nothing more than “a baby sensory video for adults,” as my friend Kelsey Weekman recently tweeted), or even subject to baseline levels of quality. In the age of reboots and reimaginings and revamps, where the only goal is ostensibly to make money off an existing fan base by capitalizing on the same qualities that made the franchise appealing to begin with, pandering to audience expectations is the one and only real objective. In that sense, focusing so much on a character the audience loathes feels like little more than a high-end troll.
Fortunately for Che haters, there appears to be some future respite from scenes about the inner turmoil of being asked to wear a zoot suit in your pilot. At the end of the third episode, Miranda takes an emergency call from her despondent son Brady after a breakup during Che’s pilot episode taping, leading to Che throwing a massive hissy fit. When Che accuses Miranda of “ruining the family scene” by attending to her near-suicidal son, their selfishness, which has been apparent to the audience all this time, seems to finally become clear to Miranda. By the end of the third episode, it doesn’t seem she has quite come to the realization the audience has long ago: that she has blown up her life, and everything that she has valued for six seasons and two movies, for an extraordinarily self-involved and irresponsible person. But by the time she’s back in New York to tend to Brady’s heartbreak, it’s looking like she’s getting closer to having a real wake-up call, and Che will soon be no longer. Oh, well. We’ll always have zaddy Tony Danza.
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July 01, 2023 at 09:00PM
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Why Is ‘And Just Like That…’ Trolling Us With Even More Che Diaz? - Rolling Stone
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