SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for “Present Tense,” Season 3, Episode 9 of “And Just Like That,” now streaming on HBO Max.
Carrie and Aidan — the rebound romance that has defined the second and third seasons of “And Just Like That” — are no more.
In the season’s ninth episode, Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) is trying her best to balance her writing ambitions with her affection for Aidan (John Corbett). Her long-distance beau is visiting from his home in Virginia, but she is at work on her novel, workshopping it with her downstairs neighbor (Jonathan Cake). The revelation of Aidan’s continued trust issues — stemming in part from Carrie having cheated on him in “Sex and the City,” the precursor series of “And Just Like That” — leads to them having a huge fight in the street, and then the sad but, finally, mutual ending to a relationship that had been both challenging and healing for Carrie.
Julie Rottenberg and Elisa Zuritsky have a long history with this storyline. A writing team that met as young children, the pair, working under showrunner Michael Patrick King wrote “Sex and the City” episodes including Season 4’s “Change of a Dress.” In that episode, Carrie and Aidan break up for what seemed, then, like the final time. (It aired in 2002 — Carrie had a lot of life left to live!) Now writers and EPs on the show (Rottenberg directs episodes as well), they wrote this breakup episode too, and they opened up to Variety about building the relationship, why Carrie and Aidan insisted on pursuing one another despite all the challenges in their way — and what the persistent fan criticism of “And Just Like That” has felt like over the show’s run.
There’s no such thing as never, but Carrie and Aidan certainly seem done for good. There must have been a lot of pressure to get that right, given how seriously breakups have been taken throughout the franchise. What did it feel like to take on writing their final fight?
Julie Rottenberg: It’s true — we as a writers’ room kill ourselves to build these stories in a way that we feel is emotionally true, and we’ve been writing these characters for so long that we know all of their Achilles’ heels. We know the third rail for each of them. We’ve also been in long relationships and marriages, and know that the fight you have is the same fight, again and again.
We worked really hard to rebuild their relationship in “And Just Like That” in a way that felt new. They had both really matured and were evolved enough to address their inherent flaws and know their pitfalls. We wanted to give them the best shot to make it work. And the reality was, given who they both are and the situation they’re in, we built an untenable situation. But we wanted them both to have a strong argument — to be able to walk away and say, I gave it everything I could, and it didn’t work.
Carrie remarks, in the midst of their fight, “I moved mountains and apartments” in order to make the relationship work. It’s a clever line, but it also emphasizes that Carrie is not the same person she was in her 30s. But despite that evolution, it’s still not enough to keep the relationship alive.
Elisa Zuritsky: Neither of us are divorced or have firsthand experience —
Rottenberg: Yet!
Zuritsky: — with blended families, but we both live in a world with people who have had to do that. We’ll think like Carrie in “Sex and the City,” asking a question, and one of the questions we batted around as we built this season was, “Is love enough?” We all know couples who have tried and failed to blend their families.
I remember reading press last season when we got them back together — not even press, but buzz, scanning social media comments. So many people were like, She better not hurt him again, or How is she going to hurt him? That was always ringing in my ears as a challenge. We’re doing this; we probably are going to undo it. How can we undo it in a way that left both of them with their dignity, their integrity, their love — and no one betrays anyone.
It’s just an intractable situation, like their final breakup on “Sex and the City”: “There are some walls you can push through, and some you can’t.”
Zuritsky: Which we wrote, by the way. This is our second breakup with them.
Returning to the idea of how fans have reacted to the show — I think it’s fair to say that there’s been a bit of a learning curve among the audience, as people shed the expectation that this show would be the same as “Sex and the City.” What has it been like for you to deal with reactions and disappointment?
Rottenberg: It’s wild! I can’t think of another situation where people have a real ownership and possessiveness about the character — there’s almost a blurring of the lines that they’re people viewers know and feel protective of. If we write a story that portrays Carrie in a certain light, people feel That’s not my Carrie and Carrie would never put up with this. I sometimes feel like it’s a Rorschach test; people’s response to the stories we’re telling usually reveals a lot about them.
Elisa and I have known each other since we were 9, so we’ve gone through many decades of knowing each other — in some ways, yes, we’re the people we were, but we’ve also changed. We wanted these characters to change, for good and for bad, because that is what happens. And sometimes, there’s discomfort around that.
Zuritsky: And sometimes there’s discomfort around the fact that they haven’t changed. I will read just as much snark about Carrie being just same old self as snark that she’s changed too much.
Julie’s laughing because she knows that I’ve had a personal journey with the press on this show. I started out Season 1 being extremely curious about how it was going to land.
Rottenberg: Brave! To a fault!
Zuritsky: I was curious — borderline masochistic. I just read everything, every single thing that was written, especially in the very, very beginning. I felt like a newborn baby; I didn’t have any calluses. I was so raw, and my feelings were hurt, and I felt misunderstood. All the things. In the second season, I made a conscious decision to back away and really read very little, and I was much better. It was much healthier. Season 3, I am somewhere in the middle, but I’m completely fascinated more than anything else. I have critical distance, almost medical distance. It’s like I work in a laboratory and results are coming in: This is a very interesting pattern I see growing here. It’s culturally interesting to me.
I won’t rewrite history and claim that “Sex and the City” was entirely without haters. But it aired at a very different time, in terms of how criticism was disseminated.
Zuritsky: It was a more passive-aggressive time. We didn’t have the same tools to be aggressive-aggressive. There was a much more dismissive, negative vibe in the air — there were fewer articles written about the show, but some of them were really harsh, and some of them were really highbrow. Highbrow, harsh takedowns of “Sex and the City” — we used to read them and be aghast. Then there would be: Oh, I’ve never watched that show. I don’t own a television. We didn’t have pitchfork culture. Now we do.
In terms of things that have caused fan consternation: Your writers’ room set a big challenge for yourselves in that Season 2 ended with a fairly clean closure on the Carrie-Aidan story. They parted ways, vowing to reunite in five years but not to be in contact in the intervening time. And as soon as Season 3 starts, she’s sending him a postcard; the thread is picked right back up. Was there trepidation in not allowing these characters to leave well enough alone?
Rottenberg: This was the big argument. The feeling was among those of us who have kids who have had really scary episodes that Aidan, in that moment [when his youngest son took drugs while Aidan was visiting Carrie], was out of his mind with guilt and fear, and created this, let’s face it, insane idea. He made an offer that even he couldn’t hold up, so we agreed — let’s face it, that’s not going to last. They love each other. We live in the modern world. They’re going to be in touch. But the baggage of having made that agreement reared its head and haunted them through all of Season 3.
Oftentimes on “Sex and the City,” a breakup gave way to a bit of an exhalation — after various times she broke up with Big or with Aidan, Carrie got to have a few fun dating episodes, or to date someone like Berger where things were a little lighter. Can we anticipate a bit of a pause in the drama of Carrie’s life?
Zuritsky: I think that’s going to be very subjective. There’s more fun to be had; Carrie’s not going to a meditation retreat.
Although that might serve her well!
Zuritsky: From what I’ve gleaned from my studies, it seems a lot of viewers will breathe a sigh of relief.
Rottenberg (left) and Zuritsky (courtesy of HBO Max).
Three seasons in, how is the blend of veteran “Sex and the City” writers and new writers working?
Rottenberg: The luxury of having Susan Fales-Hill, Rachel Palmer, Samantha Irby, Lucas Froehlich was that they had distance from these characters.
Zuritsky: But also an intimate relationship with them, as viewers.
Rottenberg: Looking at these characters with the help of people who didn’t write on the show originally was very useful. Much like old friends you’ve known for a long time, sometimes you have them stuck in a version of the past that someone who meets them later in life might not.
Zuritsky: Samantha Irby loved when Charlotte completely let her hair down and got smashed. That is something I wouldn’t have come up with, but Sam loves Charlotte in that state, and it turns out I love Charlotte in that state.
Talk to me about “the woman” — the metafictional character Carrie imagines having experiences not unlike her own as she works on her first novel.
Rottenberg: It felt like a new superpower that she gained this season, because it gave her some distance. For both of us, writing is that therapeutic thing that nothing else can match. We will continue over the season; you’ll see how it informs her life, and both shimmer against the other, the fiction in response to her life and her life in response to writing the book. But Elisa is the real prose writer here.
Zuritsky: It’s funny, because I started, in secret, working on a novel for the first time right before we started the writers’ room. I wasn’t even telling Julie at the time. When it came up in the room as an idea for Carrie, it felt very real to me. In this super-confused moment with her love life, it felt so true that she would want to shift perspective, and get distance from her own first-person voice.
I was surprised the episode ended with “How Did It End?,” off of Taylor Swift’s “The Tortured Poets Department.” Music supervision is a different department than writing, but how did that even happen?
Rottenberg: That’s an easy answer — Michael had that thought in his head. Occasionally that will happen, that one of us will have an idea for a song that we know has to be in the show. The whole approach to music is very different now than it was in the original series. You never know if you’ll get lucky enough to get the song.
I guess it speaks well of the show that Swift’s team said yes.
Rottenberg: I hope she’s not furious!
I found the episode’s ending hopeful, akin to when Carrie finds her nameplate necklace in Paris at the end of the original series and connects with who she’s meant to be: She’s walking alone at night, meeting her friends, and returning to the person she was before this Aidan tornado.
Zuritsky: We worked hard on that moment. We didn’t want her curled up in her bed depressed. We talked a lot about, do we see [Aidan] again after that street scene? No. So this felt true to her.
Rottenberg: Any breakup on this show has to end with these women together as friends. That’s the foundation, that’s what they can always come back to no matter what.
Zuritsky: That’s the love affair.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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