Last week, the world stopped turning for just a moment when And Just Like That… creator Michael Patrick King announced that his Sex and the City revi
Last week, the world stopped turning for just a moment when And Just Like That… creator Michael Patrick King announced that his Sex and the City revival series, which followed best friends Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), and Charlotte (Kristin Davis) into their 50s, would officially come to an end after three deliciously daffy and wonderfully wonky seasons.
Although many SATC fans criticized And Just Like That… for being tonally inconsistent, rife with continuity errors, and, well, “bad,” the news still sent shock waves through the community. Even the harshest And Just Like That critics couldn’t support but mourn its ending, with many expressing their complicated feelings as Carrie Bradshaw would: in the form of self-centered writing. “Do I hate-watch this every single week? Yes. Am I absolutely devastated it’s been canceled? Also yes,” read one viral tweet. If this doesn’t make sense to you, then, to quote an enduring meme of Carrie from Sex and the City 2, “You just don’t get it.”
The end of And Just Like… also means the end of Carrie Bradshaw—at least until a third revival series called I Couldn’t Help But Wonder that’s set in a Manhattan nursing home hits HBO in 20 years. “Carrie Bradshaw is the most important character that has ever graced television, and arguably, she is up there with the likes of Odysseus, Hamlet, and even Jesus,” read another viral tweet. While that might be slightly hyperbolic, Carrie has an enduring cultural significance—whether she’s strutting across the street in her Manolo Blahniks, smoking a ciggy, or simply sitting at her laptop. Parker took to Instagram to post a truly moving tribute to the character: “Carrie Bradshaw has dominated my professional heartbeat for 27 years,” wrote Parker. “I think I have loved her most of all.”
It’s never uncomplicated to say goodbye to the characters we love. But if the penultimate episode of And Just Like That… is any indication, the revival series might just be sending Carrie off into the sunset the way it always should have: by having her end up single and fabulous, exclamation point.
The original Sex and the City came to a close with a two-part finale. Carrie had moved to Paris with her newest paramour, Alexander “the Russian” Petrovsky (Mikhail Baryshnikov), leaving behind New York City, Big (Chris Noth), and, most notably, her three best girlfriends. Over the course of “An American Girl in Paris,” Carrie grows lonely and despondent; her relationship with the Russian fractures (he accidentally hits her!); and Carrie loses herself (symbolized by her misplacing her signature “Carrie” nameplate necklace.) After Miranda instructs Big to “go get our girl,” the one true love of Carrie’s life arrives in France, sweeps Carrie off her feet, and whisks her back to New York, where they go on to live happily ever after. At least, until he rides a Peloton in the season premiere of And Just Like That….
Carrie and Big winding up together was not necessarily a foregone conclusion. Sex and the City allegedly shot three alternate endings to the series; all three take place at the coffee shop where Carrie and her girls like to gather. In one version, Carrie gets engaged to the Russian and asks her best friends to be maids of honor in their shotgun wedding. In another, she tells her friends that Big is moving back from the Napa Valley to be with her. And in the last, most depressing version, Carrie ends things with the Russian, only for Big to show up in Paris and dump her for good (perhaps foreshadowing his frosty feet in the Sex and the City movie).
“Men. Fuck ’em, fuck all of them,” says Samantha. “That’s coming from a woman who has,” quips Miranda.
That version perhaps would have been the most realistic one. Yet ultimately, the series opted to give Carrie a fairy-tale ending instead. Even at the time, some viewers were perturbed by a character as intricate and independent as Carrie Bradshaw ending up with a problematic man. It didn’t support that all of her friends, including the notoriously promiscuous and relationship-phobic Samantha (Kim Cattrall), also concluded the series in committed, monogamous relationships. For a show devoted to unpacking the nuances and pitfalls of heterosexual dating, as well as the enduring power of female friendship, Carrie getting her Cinderella story just didn’t feel in the spirit of its original intent.
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