It all fell into place for me around the shoe montage. Roughly halfway through the third season ofAnd Just Like That, there is an on-screen procession of footwear, strident and unapologetically far too long. Carrie has been accused by her downstairs neighbour of walking too loudly on the floor above his bed. A parade of sandals, boots and mules strut back and forth across a polished and expensive wooden floor. I watched this march of the stilettos and began to suspect that the storyline had been retrofitted to the idea of simply showing off the shoes. And I realised that, even if that is the case, I don’t mind at all, because And Just Like That has found its feet.
It took a while for it to get there, but finally, the Sex and the City spin-off feels comfortable in its own skin. If the first two seasons were fondly received but sometimes excruciating exercises in attempting to squeeze its characters into the modern age, then this feels like a loosening of the belt. The leads are no longer trying to be anything other than themselves: absurdly rich New Yorkers in their 50s, troubled mostly by the burdens of making sure they spend enough time with their friends. Life’s primary emotional entanglements – love, work, family – are present, sure, but they hum away lightly, like ambient noise, any sharp corners dulled by vast riches.
Having sold her single-girl apartment, Carrie is now living in a sparsely furnished, absolutely massive Gramercy Park townhouse. She is still with Aidan, though he remains in Virginia, taking care of his troubled teenage son. It is a long distance relationship, with the emphasis on distance. Charlotte is still a happily married mother of two teenagers, with a successful art-dealing business, though early in the season, her dog gets cancelled. Lisa is trying to get her documentary about pioneering Black women off the ground, but the stress of it means she is sleep-talking, so her husband, Herbert, has to move to the spare room. Seema, the not entirely convincing Samantha replacement, is trying to assert her worth in the workplace. Miranda is dating again, and looking for an apartment, and is a human rights lawyer, very much in that order of importance.
You make a choice, with And Just Like That, of how to consume it. You can look at it and see its Nero-like qualities, stark and vivid. You could accuse its fluorescent fairytales of fiddling while Trump’s America burns. Much of Carrie’s ennui comes from whether or not she will buy a dining table that costs almost $7,000, so that she can begin to fill her still-empty mansion. The show scoffs at tourists in New York, rural life, the countryside, items of clothing that cost less than an average month’s rent.
Yet I find myself sinking into And Just Like That as if it is made of marshmallows and air. It is funny, warm, and self-aware enough to just about get away with it. Miranda’s ex, Che, has departed from the women’s lives and in the six episodes released to critics, they aren’t mentioned at all. Che was And Just Like That trying too hard, and in their absence, there is a sense that it has stopped putting on a front. Now, it has a kind of gauzy acceptance that these women are fully ensconced in the rarefied world of Manhattan’s wealthy, middle-aged elite. The hardest they have to try is when endlessly discussing what emojis in text messages are really meant to say.
It should be unbearable. But the show’s devotion to the fantasy of dedicated, lifelong, rock-solid friendship is what gives it a heart, and in turn, that gives its more egregious vulgarities a free pass. Most Sex and the City fans have been following the lives of Carrie, Charlotte and Miranda since 1998, and there is a specific comfort in seeing them (without Samantha, of course) operating as a unit, 27 years later. Every episode rolls on, as each minor drama softly bumps into another minor drama, with stakes so low that you have to crouch to see them. It is all so steady, so frictionless, as smooth as the foreheads of the Upper East Side.
I have no idea if it is good or not. I truly, genuinely, don’t know. It remains filled with Samantha-esque quips and puns that, like the shoe montage, appear to have been worked backwards, as if the gags come first, and the plots are created to fit them. But if there was a reluctant fondness that came when watching the first two seasons, then that fondness now appears much more readily. Their concerns are so gentle, their worries so slight, that to watch it is to be lulled into a state of easy comfort. The stilettos march on, as they always did.
And Just Like That season three aired on Sky Comedy and is available on NOW.