Carrie Bradshaw has officially hung up her Manolos for (probably) the last time. And since the final episode of And Just Like That, fans have been digesting the show’s legacy. Specifically, they’ve been digesting one moment. The most memed (and most horrifying) moment of the finale happens at Thanksgiving dinner, when Miranda’s toilet becomes clogged up with poop after one of her lactose-intolerant guests overindulges on cheese. And rather than pan away as the toilet starts to overflow, we’re given an up-close, bird’s-eye view—an image that is now forever seared into viewers’ minds.
The poop scene—like pretty much every part of AJLT—has been divisive. Some fans questioned whether the scene was a fitting farewell to such beloved characters, while others have said that the (literal) shit show felt like a metaphor for AJLT as a whole. But showrunner Michael Patrick King defended the scene, telling Deadline that Sex and the City and AJLT have “always dealt with a lot of relationship shit,” and that it “was a manifestation of how shit backs up and you have to deal with it.”
We all remember when Charlotte “Poughkeepsie’d in her pants” in the first SATC movie, with the Poughkeepsie remaining conveniently hidden off-screen, but the finale’s close-up put the show in uncharted waters. And in true Bradshaw style, I couldn’t help but wonder … what actually goes into creating a spectacle like this? So I tracked down the man responsible, prop master Michael Cory. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Slate: How did you first learn about the poop? Did you see it in the script, or did someone tap you on the shoulder and whisper: “We need poop. Lots of poop.”
Michael Cory: Michael Patrick King is very specific, so it was a scripted moment. After we get the scripts, we have a meeting with all the department heads and go through the episode. And I do remember the conversation with him about it. I remember him talking about how it had to be gross and he wanted to see “floaters.”
What did you make the poop out of?
We knew it had to be a very specific “lactose-intolerant cheese-plate disaster” type of poop—with the floater element. The floating pieces that you see most on the show were basically modeling clay that we stashed in the toilet bowl, so they’d be the first thing you see. The rest, I mixed in a giant bucket—it was made out of a bunch of bran muffins, some vanilla ice cream, oatmeal, and chocolate syrup, a lot of water, and labneh—like, a yogurt. And we didn’t mix it too much, because we wanted it chunky.
Who was involved in selecting it? Did you have to present Michael Patrick King with different options for him to choose from, like he was Goldilocks?
This is the type of stuff MPK loves—he writes it, so it’s in his head. And he gets a delight out of awkward moments and putting people in uncomfortable positions for the sake of humor. So I mixed one bucket and showed it to him. And he loved it, so then I mixed two giant buckets, which were brought to set.
If you’ve been online over the past week, you’ll have seen that the poop has become A Thing. People have been posting a lot about it …
What, like it’s a metaphor for the whole show?
Well, yeah, some people have said that. Is that hurtful to hear?
No! I love working on that show, and I love everybody involved with it. And it’s such an institution that people have attached their own feelings to it. I moved to New York at the height of Sex and the City, but a lot of people on AJLT have been working on it since the original series, so we know it’s something that people care deeply about. And we know that a good portion of people watching the show are hate-watching it, rage-watching it, or looking to it for some sort of catharsis.
Often, the job of props is to be subtle. But with the poop, it was so front-and-center—is that more fun?
My team always gets a kick out of bodily fluid jokes, or poop jokes. We did poop in Season 2 when Miranda was dating the audiobook narrator, and she stepped in cat litter, but this was a much less subtle moment.
Is there a difference between “season finale” poop and regular episode poop?
We try to put the same level of effort and tension into everything we make—even if we don’t know if something is being filmed—because it’s about building the world for the show and for the actors, too. So it doesn’t matter whether it’s the food they’re eating at Thanksgiving dinner, or the books they’re reading, or poop. To me, it isn’t any different.
The SATC-verse isn’t new to toilet humor, but I think this is the first and only time we’ve ever seen human feces on-screen. It’s still pretty unusual to see that on TV, right?
Well, I think with the cable TV networks before, you were limited in what you could show. But with the rise of streaming, that’s changing things.
I’ve got to say, I’m pretty glad it wasn’t one of the main characters’ poop …
Yeah, there’s some things you don’t need to know.
What do you think Carrie Bradshaw’s poop would look like? I bet it would look very chic.
It would be, like, rabbit pellets.
With some little Manolo Blahnik diamonds on them …
And weirdly, suede-blue?
Yup, suede-blue rabbit pellets of diamond-encrusted poop. In some ways, poop is the great equalizer, right? We all do it. Even Carrie Bradshaw has to do it …
Oh totally. And if you have kids, when they do their first poop, it’s like when they do their first art—they want to show it to you! I had a friend when I moved to New York who wanted to do a video series that was just wealthy people on the Upper East Side picking up their dog’s poop. And we did that in Season 1 of AJLT—one of the first scenes was Charlotte picking up Richard Burton’s poop with a Burberry dog-poop bag.
On both AJLT and The White Lotus, which you also worked on, you must have worked on quite a few prosthetic penises. Are they more or less challenging than poop?
Definitely more. It’s a lot more complicated, and we often rely on specialists—sculptors who specialize in that area. And also special effects too, to help with things like matching with the actor’s exact skin tone. On The White Lotus, there was that scene where Patrick Schwarzenegger gets an erection while he gets a massage. We were in Thailand making things on the fly. That was made out of a biking tube. We literally had a bike bump and someone was under the platform pumping it up, out-of-shot!
In the AJLT finale, what did the poop represent in the story, to you?
There’s obviously a wider metaphor there, but I also think it’s admirable how Carrie stays with Miranda as she cleans, and is quite nonchalant about the whole thing.
And when Miranda’s girlfriend, Joy, turns up and she hugs her while she’s still wearing the gloves?! I screamed.
That’s something that would fall into the category of what we call “shoe leather”—it’s an industry-jargon term for things a normal person would do but would take too much time to do on-screen, or would interrupt the scene. Taking off of the gloves would probably fall into that, but when they hug I think you can see Miranda is trying not to touch her with them.
This will be a memorable addition to the “poop on TV” canon. How does that feel to be part of the Poop Cinematic Universe?
It’s just another thing to make my parents proud.
