This article contains spoilers through the Season 2 finale of And Just Like That.
Throughout the original run of Sex and the City, the comforts of wealth often smoothed out the roughest conflicts—especially in romantic relationships. Friends and lovers alike papered over their transgressions by purchasing jewelry, planning overseas trips, and paying for extravagant dinners. And in true New York City form, the most meaningful gifts didn’t come in diamond but in brass, silver, nickel, and steel: house keys.
Take the decision by Carrie (played by Sarah Jessica Parker) and Mr. Big (Chris Noth) to get married in the first movie. Prompted by his purchase of a massive Park Avenue penthouse for them to live in, Carrie—ever the luxury-shoe obsessive—asked him to skip the engagement ring and instead build her a really big closet so the new apartment would feel like her home too. When Charlotte (Kristin Davis) was splitting from her lily-livered husband, he kindly—and unexpectedly—barred his overbearing mother from taking their posh Upper East Side home in the divorce proceedings. And for Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), decamping to Brooklyn at the request of her husband, Steve (David Eigenberg), was a clear sign of her devotion to their family, more so than the fact that she had proposed to him.
During the second season of And Just Like That, the franchise’s modern-day reboot, the widowed Carrie—who lost Big in the series premiere—is once again weighing what it will take for her to hold on to a love-filled home. She reunites with Aidan (John Corbett), the furniture-designing ex-fiancé who once bought the apartment next door to her decade-defining Upper East Side alcove studio in the hope of tearing down the wall between them, both literally and metaphorically. Two decades after Carrie’s cold feet ended their engagement, he is a divorced father of three living on a farm in Norfolk, Virginia, and seemingly primed for a renewed connection. But as they strike up a whirlwind courtship, Aidan refuses to step foot in her apartment, which has been Carrie’s refuge since Big’s death. “This is where we ended,” Aidan tells her after their first post-date taxi pulls up at the familiar address. “It’s all bad. And it’s just, it’s all in there.”
In the clumsily titled season finale, “The Last Supper Part Two: Entree,” written by Sex and the City stalwarts Michael Patrick King, Darren Star, and Candace Bushnell, Aidan finally crosses that charged threshold. But he arrives with no overnight bag, which immediately alerts Carrie that he’s come to confess what she’s been fearing: It’s not going to work out, at least not for awhile. The previous episode saw Aidan sitting in a hospital parking lot, furious with himself after his youngest son was critically injured in a drunk-driving accident on the way to Aidan’s empty Virginia house. Carrie, equipped with a lavish inheritance, has just purchased a massive townhouse in Gramercy Park, a light-filled dream big enough to fit Aidan and even his teenage sons. But for now, Aidan says, sitting at her dining table, his only home is with his children. Any plans to cohabit in New York will have to wait until his youngest is 18—another five years.
Though it may not signal a true end to their reunion, Aidan’s pained declaration is one of the first instances of a character on the status-obsessed series rebuffing a grandiose, property-related display of affection. It’s an intriguing direction for a show that has so often let its characters get away with throwing money at seemingly intractable problems. Although the series is occasionally maddening to watch, it hits its stride whenever it calls back to those landmark New York City homes that shape its characters and their relationships to one another without always giving in to the franchise’s overly sentimental impulses.
Steve and Miranda’s conversation in the season finale—their first warm exchange since the Season 1 dissolution of their marriage—reflects this awareness. Noting that she’d like them to stay in each other’s lives, Miranda admits that he was right to suggest they move to Brooklyn when they did, because they’d never be able to afford that house in the present. A genial bartender from Queens, Steve wasn’t as financially secure as the former corporate lawyer Miranda, to say nothing of the finance moguls, hoteliers, and doctors her friends were partnered with. Considering the constant tension caused by this class gap while they were together, the nod to Steve’s economic savvy feels like an olive branch. It’s a peak Miranda compliment, tenderness carefully swaddled in an assessment of Steve’s pragmatism. What else could it be about but a brownstone?
At the start of the episode, Carrie gets a phone call from Samantha (Kim Cattrall), whose cameo has been hotly anticipated since news of it was leaked before the start of the season. Speaking from London, Samantha tells Carrie that she won’t be able to fly into New York in time for the dinner Carrie is hosting to celebrate her last days in her old apartment. The characters’ missed connection, likely also a function of the real friction between the actors, reflects the way life is changing for the women of the series as they age and take on weightier commitments. In the first Sex and the City film, Samantha actually did manage to surprise Carrie by flying in from Los Angeles to help her friend pack up her apartment in preparation for moving in with Big. “A lot of shit went down in this place,” she said then, pulling two bottles of champagne from behind her back. “Attention must be paid.”
But paying attention to a loved one’s needs as an adult—tending to their wounds in the present tense—requires a whole lot more than impulsively booking a long-haul flight or shelling out for the best bubbly. It takes more than buying a new house, even: Just as the inheritance didn’t readily soothe the grief Carrie felt when Big died, the Gramercy Park place can’t ameliorate Aidan’s guilt over not having been there for his teenage son. Relationships in need of repair can’t be mended with flights, keys, or cosmopolitans alone. Sex and the City may not always have understood that, but it seems that And Just Like That might.
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August 25, 2023 at 12:19AM
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On 'And Just Like That,' Money Can’t Solve Every Problem - The Atlantic
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