Come, Let’s All Follow ‘And Just Like That’ Into the Abyss

The last season of And Just Like That, Michael Patrick King’s alternately goofy and graceful continuation of the Sex and the City universe, ended with our plucky heroine Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) on a shining beach in Greece, contemplating a five-year deferment of her relationship with the second love of her life, Aidan (John Corbett). What adventures might await her during that pause?

As it turns out, that gap isn’t so gappy. In season three of And Just Like That, premiering on HBO Max (and emphatically not on regular HBO) May 29, Carrie and Aidan are still very much in contact. He pops in for a visit or two; they have awkward (and off-putting) phone sex. And, true to Carrie’s only sometimes lovable solipsism, she talks about him nonstop. Much of the first six episodes of AJLT this season is devoted to the question of Aidan; too much, I daresay. The show introduces some intriguing recent facets of Aidan’s character, particularly pertaining to his questionable parenting style. Yet it leaves those issues mostly unexplored, trusting that we’re more invested in the push-pull of his and Carrie’s long-distance situationship. But what we really want—or what I really want, anyway—is to see Carrie free.

Which was always true of Sex and the City, to some extent. Though we swooned and shuddered at various season-long romantic entanglements, there was always a trust that Carrie would break away eventually, once again becoming the searching singleton we first fell in love with. And Just Like That is a different kind of show, more serial soap than episodic exploration of the vagaries of sex and dating. Drawn-out narratives are to be expected. But Carrie, still so shrewdly played by Parker, would benefit from more active stories.

We get there, almost, by mid-season, when a recent romantic possibility emerges and AJLT takes on the familiar senior timbre of discovery. It’s not just potential attraction that peps things up; we also get a whole plot line about how one friend (Carrie) relates to another (Miranda), something AJLT—which mostly has its girls atomized in their own ecosystems—rarely does. One would think that the writers would rely more heavily on the well established chemistry between Parker, Cynthia Nixon, and Kristin Davis, but they’ve mostly got the characters too busy to see one another.

Miranda is navigating life as a divorced, newly out lesbian in her 50s, meaning Nixon must again endure a series of indignities that the show would never inflict on anyone else. But Miranda’s trajectory does level out; a steady flame emerges, and it’s nice to see Miranda striding a bit more confidently through the show ’s many well-appointed spaces.

Charlotte is sent into her usual fits of prim hysteria, saddled with inane plot lines— like a cancellation scandal involving one of her dogs—and slightly more relevant stuff about the pressures of the college application process. A curveball arrives several episodes in, one that brings a heaviness down upon Charlotte that I think is too drastic an overcompensation for the frippery preceding it. Still, Davis manages to find the humanity in all the tightly wound hysteria; that has been her remarkable, and undersung, achievement since Sex and the City began.

Those three main characters are dealing with so much that you’d hardly think there was room for anything else. Yet And Just Like That continues its mission to sell us on the viability of Seema (Sarita Choudhury) and Lisa Todd Wexley (Nicole Ari Parker). Smartly, season three moves Seema more concretely into the Nu-Samantha position, albeit without all the graphic sex. Likeable as Choudhury is, though, Seema’s character never feels like more than a sketch of fabulous wealth and business acumen. Her professional struggles are tedious (and involve the most odious extended cameo of the season thus far), and her romantic travails are cartoonish (even if they do involve the best guest appearance of the season, from the great and resurging Cheri Oteri).

Ari Parker, meanwhile, is still giving one of the most assured performances on the series, but her character is out in the hinterlands of a different show entirely. There’s family and work drama to contend with, but none of it is folded back in—thematically or narratively—with the action of everyone else. She’s stuck on an island, with Charlotte her only tether to the rest of the gang. Yet she’s given a lot to do out there in her own little world, which means there’s less time for the core crew.

What’s happening within that inner circle is often engaging, even if the season’s comedy is frequently wheezy and strained, grasping for the elegant thematic rhyme and rhythm of SATC’s sharpest wit. It’s always agreeable, though—if you, like me, are so devoted to this brand that you’d pretty much watch them do anything.

This time around that is a bit more hard, living as these richies are in some sort of oblivious other-America. One goes to a show like this to escape the bitter and frightening realities of our era, and it’s usually effective in providing that ecstatic distraction. But And Just Like That’s ability to transport us has weakened some; all the blithe wealth feels more callous, even aggressive now that the country is entering what feels like its end stages. But, dumb me, I’ll follow And Just Like That into oblivion anyway. Even if, like Carrie’s fabulous but unfurnished recent Gramercy Park mansion, it’s a fancy structure with not enough inside.