It’s Time To Let Go Of Sex & The City

With the Season 2 finale of And Just Like That…, fans finally got what they had long been waiting for: Samantha Jones back on our television screen. It was an all-too-brief cameo (a phone call in which Samantha never actually shares the screen with another character), but considering the reported animosity between Kim Cattrall and Sarah Jessica Parker, we were lucky to get it at all. It was Samantha Jones! She made an “Annabelle Bronstein” reference and purred the word “fabulous.” I will take what we can get and I will be thrilled about it.

After all, this finale was all about goodbyes: goodbye to Carrie’s classic Sex and the City apartment, goodbye to Aidan (back to Virginia to parent his wayward teens), and goodbye to Samantha Jones — it seems more or less settled that’s all we’ll be seeing of her from this point on. For Aidan and Samantha, at least, the sendoffs were far better closure than the strangeness we had been given in the second SATC movie. In case you blocked the movie from your memory (smart), Carrie happens upon Aidan at a desert bazaar, and even though they’re both married to other people, they randomly kiss. I hate it so much I wish it had been a mirage. Similarly, our final memory of Samantha shouldn’t have been with the pun “Lawrence of my labia.”

So now, maybe, we can finally let go.

At her “last supper,” Carrie goes around the table and asks her guests to name, in one word, something they want to let go of; they answer, and we get all the classics: regret, self-doubt, guilt, etc. But for viewers, the scene implies there is one thing we should be letting go of: Sex and the City — at least in the way that we’ve constantly let it live in comparison to AJLT.

As a lifelong fan of the franchise who knew the characters’ one-night-stands as well as any of the bad dates my real-life friends went on, there was something uncanny about AJLT that sometimes verged on troubling. Their clothes were too fashionable, their puns too forced. It was like entering a world of expensive wish-fulfillment that looked familiar, but with a rubbery, inauthentic sheen to it all.

I’ve struggled with AJLT mainly because it’s not Sex and the City — a failure made all too obvious because the reboot constantly draws from the well of SATC nostalgia. The original show was so comforting because I could rewatch it over and over again. I knew the patterns and could anticipate the sex puns before Samantha said them. But the old Sex and the City will always exist on whatever Max decides to call itself (at least until the streamer decides to remove it from their platform to save money on residuals).

I hope the goodbyes in the Season 2 finale signal that AJLT is beginning to embrace that it’s strongest when the show leaves the past behind and does its own thing. That also means it’s time for me to accept that AJLT needs to be its own animal — a weird, sometimes atonal, strangely paced, impractically fashioned animal.

They say the only constant is change. (Isn’t it wild how an HBO show partially about shoes and sex is turning me into a philosopher?) And so, until we see what bizarre revelations come about in AJLT Season 3 (predictions: Rock decides to become an orthodox child rabbi, Carrie starts a zine, Charlotte and Harry have a three-way with Damien Hirst), I will work on letting go of my attachment to nostalgia. Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha are never going to be at brunch again together. But even if it’s with Seema on a beach in Greece, it’s nice seeing Carrie Bradshaw sipping a cosmopolitan again.