And Just Like That... the Sex and the City girls are back, but how do they fare in 2023?

As the Sex & the City spin off returns, Suzanne Harrington hopes season two brings Carrie and co back to their former glory

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And Just Like That… the thing they said could never happen is happening. Kim Cattrall is back. 

As season two of the Sex & The City spin-off gets ready to launch on June 22, Variety breathlessly reports that yes, Cattrall will have a cameo, to be aired during the final episode in August. 

And just like that, Samantha Jones effortlessly upstages her former co-stars with a single scene.

Filmed separately in New York in March, the scene is a phone conversation with Carrie, alluded to at the end of season one. 

As we all know, real-life Samantha and Carrie are not friends; Cattrall declined to get on board with the reboot fronted by her former colleague Sarah Jessica Parker, with words roughly translating as ‘my dead body’ and ‘over’. 

Perhaps some extra zeroes added to her fee persuaded her back, plus being dressed by the inimitable Patricia Field, the original S&TC stylist (who does not work on AJLT).

The S&TC actors were never friends, Cattrall has emphatically told anyone who’d listen, from Piers Morgan to Instagram. 

A ‘mean girls’ culture is said to have finished Sex & The City off, although the other three actors — SJP, Cynthia Nixon (Miranda), and Kristin Davis (Charlotte) apparently get along famously. 

When original creator Darren Star left and was replaced by SJP’s friend Michael Patrick King, Cattrall was left feeling further isolated — there are feud timelines all over the internet outlining the fallout between real-life Carrie and Samantha. 

Which is kind of sad, given how the whole premise of the original series was not so much about sex as female friendships.

Kim Cattrall arrives at the Glamour Women of the Year Awards at Outernet London. Ms Cattrall will reportedly reprise her role of Samantha Jones for a one scene cameo in the Sex And The City spin-off And Just Like That.

THE OVERHAUL

It’s a brave venture to take a beloved, seminal series and recreate it twenty years later; reactions to John Cleese bringing back Fawlty Towers after forty years have veered between trepidation and outright horror. 

S&TC was very much of its time; straight rich white women wafting around Manhattan, shopping, and fucking. All jolly good fun, but to integrate it into the 2020s, it needed a profound cultural overhaul. And it got one.

But has the overhaul been overdone? The original series, set in New York City rather than some quaint Connecticut backwater, was frankly crying out for diversity; it desperately needed a non-binary Mexican-Irish LGBTQ+ activist like Che, or a 13-year-old they/them who morphs from Charlotte’s floral-clad daughter to a Bat Mitzvah-refusing teen renamed Rock, or a Smita-Smitten-Showbiz-Kitten type character called Seema inserted from nowhere to hang out with Carrie, in order to reflect the world around them. 

So it’s not so much these new characters which are problematic, despite being sledgehammered in to modernise the series. No, the real problem with AJLT is what has been done to the established characters. Have they become a bit unrecognisable?

Basically, Miranda. What’s happened to her? 

Always S&TC’s most underrated character, while Carrie and Samantha were consuming Cosmopolitans and men, and Charlotte husband-hunting up and down Park Avenue, Miranda was making partner at her law firm and single parenting a red-haired baby; she was the feminist of the quartet, except we thought she was the boring one. 

Then in 2017, someone came up with the We Should All Be Mirandas t-shirt in an homage to the show’s strongest role model, produced in response to Carrie wearing one of those eight hundred dollar Dior t-shirts suggesting we should all be feminists. Please. On her freelance income?

Fast forward a couple of decades from the original series and Miranda — modern, focused, fearless Miranda — seems to have been replaced by a dithery, castrated Karen who isn’t tech-savvy, can’t figure out podcasts, and freaks when her red-haired baby — now a young adult — smokes weed (it’s legal in NYC). 

Yes, she’s had an awakening away from corporate law to something more meaningful but seems to not know how to behave around fellow New Yorkers who are not white, just as her same-sex awakening and dead marriage to Steve are being played out by an unrecognisable character lacking confidence and bite. 

Who is she, and where is Miranda Hobbes? The disintegration of her character would make a bit more sense if there were some overt menopause references — Miranda, Carrie, and Charlotte are in their mid-fifties — but instead, we have an unconvincing storyline about Miranda’s drinking.

This new chapter of the iconic HBO series Sex and the City finds Carrie Bradshaw, Miranda Hobbes, and Charlotte York navigating life and friendship in their 50s.

WONKY LETRASET

And then there’s the problem of Che. Unfunny comedian Che Diaz, flung at us — and Miranda — in a box-ticking exercise which could have been radical and brilliant but instead is implausible and faintly daft, is not a disaster because of bad acting as much as bad writing. 

Sara Ramirez has done her best. It’s the series’ writers who seem to have constructed the Che character — and Miranda’s hypnotised reaction to her — from wonky Letraset. She just doesn’t work. 

Nor does the idea of Miranda quitting her internship at a human rights organisation to run off to LA with Che — while wanting to extricate herself from a dead marriage to poor old Steve is entirely believable, tearing up her own career to chase someone else’s seems to be astonishingly out of character.

“Am I not allowed to change a little bit?” she asks Carrie. “Or a lot? Or change back again if I feel like it? Do I have to follow my own rigid rules until the day that I die?” 

What AJLT fails to deliver is not someone evolving as much as someone being killed off and replaced by a Stepford version of themselves. In this case, the formerly formidable Miranda.

Still, at least Carrie is reasonably consistent. She still wears heels, even in an era where we are all about yoga and spine health. 

Her grieving for Big was nuanced, although her career move to podcasting was as clunky as the Che character who plays her boss. 

And unlike Chris Noth, who will definitely not be returning to the series anytime ever, his character killed off in the face of multiple accusations of real-life sexual misconduct, another of Carrie’s exes is set to make a comeback in season two.

Enter Aidan (John Corbett), the outsized anti-smoking furniture maker from S&TC, last seen by Carrie when the pair implausibly crossed paths during the franchise’s ill-advised film outing to Abu Dhabi. 

In the absence of Mr Big, Mr Unfeasibly Large is set to rekindle something with Carrie. Will it work? Do we care? Or have we realised that watching AJLT is a bit like getting back with a lover who was fun at the time, but whom we have massively outgrown? Will this be the dynamic between Carrie and Aidan, or will they bring something fresh to their storyline? (Given the inconsistencies of the writing, this could be anything from a sudden shared passion for flat shoes to smoking crack together).

Carrie and Aidan in And Just Like That...

SEX WITH THE EX

Unexpectedly, it’s the prissily uptight Charlotte who seems to be moving forward in terms of character development. 

Charlotte has always been the punchline, the shockable maiden aunt, the pursuer of style-cramping marriage and motherhood as the other three followed sex and money; when we re-engage with Charlotte as the parent of two teenagers, still happily married to everyone’s favourite Jewish divorce lawyer, and still hanging out with the Samantha-replacing Anthony, has she loosened up a little?

The obvious subtext of her stepping in to be Bat Mitzvahed - when her teenage child Rock refuses - is that one can become a woman at any age.

However, the real question is can S&TC successfully become AJLT, launching itself forward in time, without disintegrating on impact? 

The more fifty- and sixty-something women on screen the better, but without credible character development, the whole reboot teeters like high heels on uneven ground — and just like that, falls over. 

We’ll still watch it though — it’s TV’s equivalent of sex with the ex.