“And Just Like That . . . ,” Carrie Bradshaw Bids an Unsatisfying Farewell

On Thursday, the third and final season of “And Just Like That . . . ,” the sequel series to “Sex and the City,” came to an unceremonious end. The episode takes place over Thanksgiving, but the central quintet does not celebrate the holiday together, with only Carrie joining Miranda on a minor-milestone day: the first time that Miranda’s grown son Brady, now expecting his own child with a woman he barely knows, assumes turkey-dinner duties for his makeshift tribe. On the original show, the core foursome—Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda, and Samantha—frequently gathered as a chosen family. In the finale, the absence of Charlotte, Lisa, and Seema from the festivities lends a wistful air to Carrie’s ostensibly defiant embrace of her single status after Big’s death and several failed romances. Her open fate is a dramatic turn from the bow-tied happy ending of “Sex and the City,” in which Big flies to Paris to whisk an unhappy Carrie back to New York. And yet this theoretically more daring conclusion is accompanied by one final disappointment to be endured by the viewers—it’s hard to imagine that the show has actual “fans”—a series of vignettes with rushed, unsatisfying resolutions that give short shrift to almost every character.

No extension of the “Sex and the City” franchise—the two movies, the prequel series “The Carrie Diaries,” “And Just Like That”—has managed to capture the magic of the original iteration: a genuine cultural phenomenon and one of the most influential TV shows ever made. Plenty of subsequent programs have been compared with it, but, even in imitation-prone Hollywood, “S.A.T.C.” has generated surprisingly few copycats. The series stands alone, especially in one regard, which is key to its appeal: its unabashed and unreflective aspiration. “Sex and the City,” which began in 1998 and concluded in 2004, represented the zenith of New York as an upscale playground—and the collapse of that dream. The TV landscape and the culture at large changed so substantially after its run that, perhaps, “And Just Like That” was almost doomed to fail.

“Sex and the City” was hardly the first TV show to foreground female friendship, or even the first to illustrate how women can serve as one another’s safety nets. (On “Friends,” a desperate Rachel moves into Monica’s rent-controlled apartment after fleeing her wedding, and, on “The Golden Girls,” Blanche’s Miami home was a sanctuary for her often financially strapped housemates.) Carrie and company paved the way for many more comedies about gal pals, but, especially in the years after the Great Recession, newer characters were content with modest trappings or had to contend with class differences across friendships. “Girls” (2012) famously put its protagonist in ill-fitting clothes; Hannah Horvath’s awkward outfits reflected her unfocussed existence. On “Broad City” (2014), one half of the slacker pair doesn’t even live in Brooklyn, but Queens. On “Insecure” (2016), Molly, a lawyer, displays frustration at her best friend Issa’s seeming lack of ambition, which comes with the scant paycheck to match. Part of this downscaling was that the characters tended to be younger and broker than the ones on “Sex and the City.” But part of it, too, is that TV’s then burgeoning interest in greater authenticity had to include economic realities.

Meanwhile, the shows that strived to perpetuate a vision of media-industry-based glossiness—channelling the fantasy of Carrie’s rate of $4.50 a word at Vogue—quickly developed reputations as hate-watches. “The Bold Type” (2017), which centered on three twentysomethings employed at a Cosmopolitan-esque monthly, became a favored punching bag among real-life media employees, for the dramedy’s out-of-date depictions of the inner workings of a magazine. “Emily in Paris” (2020), which shares a creator, Darren Star, with “Sex and the City,” is more in tune with digital content creation today, showing Emily’s development of a personal expat account, one Instagram post at a time, alongside her nine-to-five marketing job. The series has never strived to be anything more than opulent fluff, but it still gets consistently pilloried for its lack of realism. Perhaps the candy coating is no longer so easy to swallow because it’s become so painless to look up apartment listings, salary figures, and retail prices and do the math ourselves—a Google-centric mode of watching that was far less common during “S.A.T.C.” ’s heyday. And perhaps it’s also because, in our highly unequal times, wealth porn is often inextricably tied to class resentment.

These days, the TV equivalent of a Manolo Blahnik—fancy, pretty, painful—is the prestige soap about miserable one-per-centers. “Big Little Lies” (2017), “Succession” (2018), and “The Gilded Age” (2022) drum over and over that money can’t buy a life well lived. The actual rich keep finding new places to stash themselves away—on superyachts, in underground bunkers, off the planet altogether—and yet spectacles of wealth are now accessible 24/7 through our devices. With just a few taps on a phone, anyone can learn what it’s like to look rich, or at least perform rich, which is why, in the late twenty-tens and early twenty-twenties, the culture went wild for scammers, who became the folk heroes of a micro-generation. Conwoman narratives helped popularize the fantasy that, if society no longer offered the possibility of upward mobility, the most brazen among us could trick or cajole some deep-pocketed idiot into sharing the perks that such inequality could yield. Once TV had its fill of millennial grubbiness, it pivoted toward adjacency to wealth à la the Anna Delvey bio-series “Inventing Anna” (2022) and the personal-assistant drama “Sirens” (2025).

Carrie Bradshaw reëntered the scene in 2021. The decision probably made sense on paper. Like “Friends,” “Sex and the City” seemed to be on repeat forever, finding new fans in every generation. (Given today’s nostalgia for the relative affluence and economic stability of the nineties, those shows’ financial improbabilities don’t seem to rankle Gen Z viewers so much.) But despite the initial buzziness around “And Just Like That,” the odds were against it. “Sex and the City” had brilliantly captured an era, the last days when tastemakers still ruled over a monoculture and aspiration looked the same to people across the country. (Only two years after “Sex and the City” went off the air, “The Devil Wears Prada” cemented the mythos of an all-powerful editrix—just before the internet would permanently erode her influence.) In Carrie and her friends’ reliance on anecdotes, archetypes, and advice, their adventures often feel like a women’s magazine in dramatized form—a voicey compendium of topics both serious and silly, delivered in easily digestible morsels. But most magazines are now mere shadows of themselves. The gloss that readers were meant to reach for was exposed as élitist, out-of-touch, and exclusionary. Carrie and her friends’ authority over Manhattan cool originally evoked a big-sister confidence that would be difficult to replicate now, at a time when suspicion dogs anyone claiming knowledge or expertise. But “And Just Like That” barely seemed to bother, so afraid of offending that it scarcely seemed to have a point of view.

Admittedly, by the end of the third season, the show was on a slight upswing, having shed its clumsiest story lines (Carrie stopped podcasting, the controversial nonbinary character Che was long gone, Aidan lost his mantle as the one that got away, etc.) But the series still seemed unsalvageable. Carrie’s economic situation never made much sense on “Sex and the City,” but, by shackling her with the golden handcuffs of Big’s seemingly infinite fortune, the franchise robbed her of her everywoman foibles. It’s one thing for thirtysomething Carrie to be defined by a one-bedroom apartment, a closet full of designer clothes, and a level of economic precarity that must be studiously ignored so as to not go insane; a fun-chasing spendthrift who fritters her freelance checks on cocktails and shoes speaks directly to the id. But the older Carrie goes through four apartments in three seasons—at a time when housing-affordability anxieties are at a fever pitch—a move seemingly designed to make Gwyneth Paltrow look comparatively relatable.

But is “And Just Like That” bad enough to retroactively diminish its predecessor? I’d argue yes. “Sex and the City” was intoxicating for its vision of freedom: to create a life as one saw fit, away from the constraints of traditional female roles; to explore one’s sexuality beyond the threat of male violence; to be as pleasure-seeking or as frivolous as one cared to be, which explains all the deluxe frippery. Marrying rich, as Carrie and Charlotte did, was supposed to be the ultimate consolidation of that power. But the characters’ most recent chapters accidentally illustrated the opposite: their wealth trapped them in a numbingly weightless world where nothing really happened and precious little mattered. Carrie could have had anything, and she traded away possibility for more clothes. ♦