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Seema Is The MVP Of And Just Like That...
In praise of the one character on whom the “too much” seems just right.
From the moment Max announced that And Just Like That… wouldn’t be including Kim Cattrall’s Samantha Jones as a main cast member, it seemed like the show would be facing a Herculean task. Samantha was an indelible part of Sex and the City’s alchemical magic. She is a brazen, bawdy, and, yes, sexy counterweight to Charlotte’s prudishness, Miranda’s cynicism, and Carrie’s slightly self-centered romantic mythologizing. Trying to do Sex and the City without Samantha, at least on paper, seemed impossible. (And a one-scene cameo in an upcoming episode isn’t going to cut it!)
But as AJLT began to hit its stride halfway through the second season, it, fortunately, has found a new character with the same lust for life: Seema Patel.
Seema, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways. Seema (played by iconic actress Sarita Choudhury — have you seen The Green Knight? Go watch The Green Knight right now) glides across the screen draped in caftans and designer silks, her hair full with the bounciest blowouts when it’s not tucked beneath her Grace Kelly scarves. AJLT made the costuming decision to transform all the clothing on screen into wish-fulfillment maximalism, realism be damned. Seema is the one character on whom the “too much” seems just right.
It isn’t just Seema’s style that makes her so essential to the SATC sequel.
She has Samantha’s f*ck-them-all joie de vivre spirit, as many fans have noted. (Even Choudhury has responded to those comparisons, saying she’s flattered but that in many ways the two women are not similar at all.) Seema’s plotlines, too, resemble the zaniness that SATC used to send Samantha’s way. In the second season’s third episode, Seema is heartbroken over a beloved Birkin bag stolen by a mugger, which recalls the extreme lengths Samantha went through to get her hands on her own Birkin, posing as Lucy Liu in order to weasel her way up the waitlist.
Seema also has the Old New York BDE aura that Peloton-fallen Mr. Big epitomized. Like Big, she moves around the city in a chauffeur-driven car — always with the same driver. (We stan a loyal queen.)
AJLT is an interesting animal in that it’s both a television show and a real-time rebuttal to the critiques that have been levied against the original series in the quarter century since its release. One such criticism was that SATC depicted a New York City in which the protagonist’s entire friend group was white. And so when Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte returned to the screen, they brought Nya Wallace (Karen Pittman), Lisa Todd Wexler (Nicole Ari Parker), and Seema with them. (Meanwhile, the show seemingly has not answered the critique of Che’s comedy being bad because their closing joke during a standup set was... No one drives in Los Angeles. Groundbreaking!)
But critics have found a lot of fault in the show’s attempts to diversify the cast, with some noting how the new characters, especially Nya and Lisa Todd, are “diversity girlfriends.” For most of the first season, they “kept in their lanes,” rarely interacting with each other while propping up the main characters, as one commentator wrote.
In the second season, however, Seema blazes across the screen as a real and messy person. She swears, and she smokes, which seems vaguely scandalous for TV by 2023 standards. She is very judgmental of men with standards that are arguably too high. She brandishes a fake gun to scare off a would-be mugger, storms off from a judgmental hair stylist, and breaks up with a French artist for living with his ex-wife. And she cares about a Birkin bag, because of course she would! What might come across as vain instead feels grounded and realistic. Her life is as chaotic as it is glamorous, and we love her not in spite of it, but because of it.
SATC became so iconic partly because it tapped into the very human need to see our own experiences represented and, when necessary, absolved. Carrie and her friends made some terrible decisions, but they were still funny, charming, and worthy of love — accepted entirely for who they were. Isn’t that everything everyone wants? As someone who has thrown cake in the garbage to prevent myself from eating it and been dumped, well, not by Post-it Note but by very half-assed text, it was revelatory to see those experiences on screen.
Seema has begun to fill the Samantha-sized hole in Carrie’s life (and I recognize there was nothing Samantha herself liked more than getting a hole filled. I’m sorry, I’m sorry!). Everyone needs that friend you can call in a crisis and tell them that you faked COVID to get out of an obligation, and I hope when that friend shows up at your door, they arrive in a wildly impractical Louis Vuitton mask.
