Every Thursday morning, I hustle the kids off to school and go straight to HBO Max with my first cup of coffee to see what horror the writers of And Just Like That have done to the Sex and the City reboot. I can’t even wait until a decent hour when TV watching is acceptable. Nope. I’m on that at 7:50 a.m. to torture myself with what is quite possibly the worst show that has ever been made in the history of television. I have made it seven episodes in and I can’t be silent anymore. The white-hot hatred that is rising up in my chest must go somewhere.
First, why is it called And Just Like That? No one can remember it. Everyone calls it Sex and the City because…that’s the show! The beloved show that was on the air for seven seasons cannot just suddenly be called something else. Who did this and why? Was it just to remind us of Carrie Bradshaw’s terrible cliched writing that we were all supposed to accept was good? If I ended every one of my columns with “and just like that…” or “I couldn’t help but wonder,” the esteemed managing editor Paula Bolyard would never have hired me. No New York newspaper would have ever published Carrie’s column, and I would never have noticed that if these writers did not name the show after one of the worst and most overused phrases in her vocabulary.
Or maybe they called it And Just Like That because there’s no sex in it. The only sex in this show is grotesque. It seeks to sicken instead of entertain or titillate. It embarrasses and shames (Brady’s gross teen sex and Miranda’s gross cheating non-binary sex) instead of expressing joy, fun, or comedy. There were times in the original series that I thought “that’s too far, too much, didn’t need to see that,” but even when it was too far, it still made us laugh. At its heart, SATC was a comedy. I get the feeling that this series is trying hard to upset us.
The first episode of AJLT was so bad that I immediately began watching the old series from the first season to the last just to verify if it had always been this bad or if it really was as great as I remembered. SATC was even better than I remembered. I binged the whole thing in a matter of days. The only thing I found wrong with it was Carrie’s terrible writing. And why was I paying such close attention to her writing? Because AJLT left it completely out of Carrie’s life. At 55 years old, we are to believe that Carrie Bradshaw, columnist and author, is not writing at all and is instead on a cringe, graphic, and gross podcast that no one would listen to where she is forced to talk about public masturbation and endure a non-binary co-host that hits something called a “woke moment” button constantly in order to explain jokes that aren’t funny.
Gone is Carrie’s voice actively writing her weekly column over the episode. It was never narration as some have described but Carrie the writer working on what she was turning in that week. It made sense. The column wasn’t very good, but it held the story together and it defined who this character was. She’s a writer. Writers write. We do not suddenly stop writing to be on a podcast. We do podcasts and other things but the writing never, ever stops. I spoke to Stephen Green and Stephen Kruiser about this on this week’s Live Chat and both of them agreed that if we were all suddenly unemployed, we would still be writing. We don’t do it for the paycheck, we do it because we can’t stop.
The “writers” of AJLT (who are all new) are not really writers. They may be Hollywood “idea men” or “women” or “non-binary elfinselves” but they are not writers. If they were, they would know that you can’t make a writer stop writing! It simply doesn’t happen! Take away the laptops and we would fill notebooks. I have boxes of them in the basement—MANY BOXES. My entire life is written out on spiral notebooks. My house is littered with full journals…there are three of them on my desk right now. I have so much writing that if we ever have a heating crisis I will have fuel for 40 years in the form of paper!
I endured seven episodes of this, including killing off Mr. Big and the love story the entire series was about, through Miranda getting “woke” and cheating on Steve with the unctuous non-binary Che Diaz (who makes Hannah Gadsby look like Richard Pryor), through Charlotte having some kind of mid-life mental breakdown where she can’t act normal anymore because she has to check all the boxes for forced diversity, to watching Carrie flounder around in menswear looking like American Gothic grandma.
These writers hate this show, the characters, and the fans. They’ve taken everything we loved about the show: the fashion, the joyfulness and fun, the city of New York, the romance—and they’re killing it slowly with the skill of a psychopathic serial killer. We can’t even rip off the bandaid by binging all the episodes at once because they’re making us wait, terrified for what’s coming next week. It’s sadism.
And while they are torturing our beloved characters— Samantha turns her back on her friends, Carrie is a dumpy frump with no identity or charm, Miranda is a woke drunk Karen who mistreats Steve, and Charlotte wants to be the most progressive mommy on the block by indulging her daughter’s gender confusion that might just be a phase—they’ve introduced characters we don’t know and could not care less about.
Instead of giving us storylines for characters that are already in the show like Steve and Harry or even Brady, they’re forcing us to get to know new people, who if we liked they would probably ruin anyway. The only new character who is any good at all is Charlotte’s friend LTW because she’s the only one who brings the glamour back to the show. She’s gorgeous, and apparently, she’s the only one the costume department likes. The rest of the new characters are part of checking that diversity box and not even the woke crowd likes it. Please yell it for those in the back, WHY ARE YOU TREATING MINORITY CHARACTERS LIKE ACCESSORIES? It’s weird, it’s forced, and it’s not necessary.
This brings me to another problem. The original show made NYC a larger-than-life character. It was shot to show off NYC at every opportunity. There was even an episode where Carrie begins “dating” the city because it had so much to offer. But of course, that was during the Guiliani years when NYC really was great and clean and the crime was down and the porn pushers got kicked out of Times Square. Those were the good years. I guess it would be hard to show NYC in a good light now with half the restaurants shuttered, Versace boarded up, and random looting going on.
But they didn’t even try. They’re using green screens instead of going on location. They’re using sets instead of streets. Why are they doing this? Are they cheap? Or do they just really not know what it is that made SATC great? I believe they know and they hate it, and so they’ve set out to destroy it while patting themselves on the back for all the great work they’re doing for “diversity.” But all they’ve managed to do is piss everyone off. Not even trans podcasters like it! Literally, everyone hates Che Diaz, the non-binary non-comedic comedian. And in case you didn’t get the point of this reboot that the writers are using to hit you over the head like a 200-pound sledgehammer, Diaz’s “comedy concert” special is literally called “Check the Box.” They actually named the comedy show after their intentions to check all the boxes on the insufferable woke left’s diversity bingo card.
