I started watching Sex and the City in college. On Sunday nights, I’d walk over to my friend Anna’s room in our small Midwestern liberal arts college. I’d sit on the cheaply carpeted floor, our friend Kate on the bed. We’d drink beer or Fresca, eat bags of Doritos and greasy cafeteria pizza. We screamed about the Post-it note breakup. The $485 shoes stolen at the baby shower. Sex swings and dildos and gorgeous, gorgeous clothes.
Back then, the New York world of Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), Charlotte (Kristin Davis), and Samantha (Kim Cattrall) felt so far away. I watched them like I was ogling jewelry in a Tiffany case. It was glamorous, fascinating, sparkly, sometimes incredibly tacky, but always a fantasy life for someone else.
We’d take the BuzzFeed quizzes to determine which SATC type we were. I was a Charlotte, Anna the Carrie, Kate the Miranda. (No Samathas — we were good Midwestern girls then.) It was a safe kind of a foil for us and our lives. We didn’t have the shoes, the hair, the Manhattan apartments, or the careers, but we still had to muddle through the same morass of love and loss, and failed relationships.
I am still friends with Anna and Kate. In the past 24 years, we’ve accumulated four marriages, three divorces, three kids, and so much joy and heartbreak we’ve stopped keeping track. And no matter where my friends and I have lived, or who we’ve been married to, we’ve always had each other, and Carrie Bradshaw.
When And Just Like That… premiered in December of 2021, we watched it again. We live far apart now, Fresca and Doritos making way for weed gummies and water. We are in our forties, we’re tired, our stomachs hurt, and none of us is sitting on the floor anymore. But now, with Thursday night’s conclusion of Season Three, our time with Carrie and friends is ending. Showrunner Michael Patrick King announced in an Aug. 1 Instagram post that the season finale would also serve as the last stop for the characters we’ve come to know and love.
The finale was not a kumbaya moment for the women — a fractured Thanksgiving Day flooded with interpersonal drama and shit, both metaphorical and literal (see: Miranda’s clogged toilet). At the end of the holiday, Carrie found herself alone, with an entire pie all to herself, in her huge home. It was not an easy happily-ever-after. But it was still a triumph. After 27 years of watching Carrie Bradshaw go through relationship after relationship, ending up not alone, but on her own, it felt like a detente, an uneasy peace with the world of heteronormative relationships.
In the three years since Carrie came back into our lives, many fans criticized the sequel series: The characters were obnoxious, the plot lines humiliating. Miranda is now fully gay, split up from Steve (David Eigenberg), her son Brady (Niall Cunningham) a man-child stumbling through his twenties. Charlotte is married with two children, one of them nonbinary, and she is reentering the workforce. Anthony Marentino (Mario Cantone), originally an SATC sidekick as Charlotte’s wedding planner (and then Carrie’s, in the first movie) is a fully fleshed-out character who runs a bakery where men in hot pants sell baguettes (get it?). Samantha was there in absentia only, living in London, since Kim Cattrall decided not to come back for round two. In her stead, the sequel added Seema Patel (Sarita Choudhury), a sexy, high-profile real estate broker; and Lisa Todd Wexley (Nicole Ari Parker), an ambitious documentary filmmaker whose children go to the same exclusive private school as Charlotte’s.
And Carrie, after getting on the apps, starting a podcast, and having it shut down, got back together with Aidan (John Corbett) 22 years after their second breakup, only for it to fail spectacularly all over again. She has a fling with a sexy author who lives below her, but it’s short-lived. As she tells Charlotte, “I have to quit thinking maybe a man. And start accepting maybe just me.”
For many, the glamour of it all seemed to be gone, replaced with a glossy series of embarrassments. Why can’t these women get it together? the critics cried. Why can’t there be dignity? Why do they have to be so cringey? Why can’t they…
Why can’t they what? You want Carrie to sit at home and knit? You want them to drink water, journal, do “thought work,” talk about their healing journeys?
“What is it you want from Carrie?” I want to scream. Because whatever she’s given us — and I don’t always know what that is — it’s always been so much. The muchness of these two series (and the two feature films in between) and the lives of these women has always been the point. The stories have overflowed with a horrible, glorious narrative abundance. There is always adventure. Always sex. Always tears. Always a Cosmo with a friend at the end of the day. Carrie gave us so much, but never perfection. And I thank her for that. Because that would be the one narrative I couldn’t stand.
Carrie Bradshaw, frankly, has always been a mess — a beautiful, cringe-inducing, selfish, couture-wearing mess. I recently made my daughter, a 14-year-old, and her Gen Z friends watch the episode from the original series where Carrie dates the bisexual man, Sean, and is utterly baffled by his fluidity. (Alanis Morrissette makes a guest appearance at a party for cool young people who play spin the bottle, her character and Carrie sharing what was at the time, I guess, a scandalous kiss.) The kids shrieked and groaned, just as much as I did watching Miranda follow her annoying comedian love, Che (Sara Ramirez), to L.A. in And Just Like That…, and then return uncoupled in shame.
“But why is it cringe?” my daughter asked. “Because life is,” I told her. I got an eye-roll. But it’s true.
Who cares if the ending wasn’t what you wanted? Who ever gets the ending they want from this life? And wasn’t the story of Carrie Bradshaw always the story of a woman seeking and never finding? Maybe finding pie, and peace, is enough. People who demand some sort of narrative continuity from a show that has always been absurd and complicated are remembering a Carrie who never existed.
The outcry over Carrie Bradshaw has always been less about the character and more about our culture. Right now, we are in a cultural regression that doesn’t want to see women in public life. The rollback of reproductive rights, the ascendance of the trad wife as a cultural figure — these changes seem to say, “We don’t want to see women alone, fucking around in beautiful shoes in a big city.”
Part of the cultural discomfort with the show’s reboot reflects a squeamishness with the idea of women aging. We want women to age, but to do so gracefully (whatever that means), and do it over there, where we don’t have to see the tears, the mess, the continued mortifications and heartbreaks.
I love that the show was rebooted. I love that it didn’t let Carrie or the rest of us off the hook with the fairy-tale of a life with Chris Noth’s iconic character, Big (for those who don’t know, he died in the first episode of the sequel series — a heart attack during a Peloton ride), which we all knew would never be that great. I love that it came back and it forced us to uncomfortably face the fact that none of us makes it to middle age unscathed. That there is impotence and cancer and infidelity and vanity and loss. That you can get so much therapy and still come out and have sex with a nun (that would be a lesbian-Miranda subplot in AJLT). That’s life. I’ve definitely done worse.
These characters dealt with it all, the literal and metaphorical shit. So, in that way, it was one of the most surreally real shows. A fantastic, absurdist fever dream that has felt more perfectly imperfect than anything else on TV to date.
I realize in some ways that my desire to scream is a misdirected anger at the critics. What I really want is to scream at is a world that asks so much of women and our lives and our stories. What else do you want from us? You want us to fade off into a polished, beautiful oblivion, so you can pretend we didn’t age, didn’t get Botox, didn’t struggle with a world that constantly pulls the rug out from under us just when we think we’ve gotten there? Because, the truth is, we will never get there.
Whatever else we are, we are human, we are fallible, we are cringey messes, and often shitty friends; we don’t age well, or parent well. Our kids are bratty, and we don’t understand them. Our partners are needy. There is shit welling up from our toilets, we have complicated work relationships, we live through disappointments, and love affairs, and professional ambition, and everything goes wrong more often than it goes right. We often wonder how we got here. And more often than not, like Carrie Bradshaw, we are giving up on dreams of a man and embracing the dreams of ourselves. It’s not pretty, but here we still are, shoes off, eating a whole pie in the kitchen.
So, I say long live Carrie Bradshaw. Thank you for giving us your muchness and your mess. And long live the rest of us horribly wonderful and glorious women.
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