Early Thursday morning, the first two episodes of “And Just Like That” arrived on HBO Max, heralding the click-clack return of the “Sex and the City” universe, the first new installment since the misbegotten 2010 film “Sex and the City 2.” Kim Cattrall had already departed the franchise, declining to return for a planned third film.
The first moments of the first episode, which checks in on Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie, Cynthia Nixon’s Miranda and Kristin Davis’s Charlotte in their mid-50s, quickly explain Samantha’s disappearance.
The state of the book business meant that Carrie no longer needed a personal publicist.
This conversation seems to allude, elliptically, to the rumored real-life feud between Parker and Cattrall.
Without Samantha’s libertine ways, this new version has a more somber feel, underscored by a big twist that comes at the end of the first episode.
That scrapped third movie was rumored to have begun with Carrie’s husband Big having a heart attack in the shower.
There are other changes, too, like the inclusion of four new characters of color played by Sarita Choudhury, Nicole Ari Parker, Karen Pittman and Sara Ramírez.
In a muted review, James Poniewozik argues that the revival is really two shows, which don’t seem especially well integrated.
The Washington Post ran a riotously negative review of the original “Sex and the City.” And Inkoo Kang hates the revival, too, even as her analysis avoids the misogyny of that earlier critique.
Richard Lawson, a devoted fan of the franchise, questions the tone of the series and the ways its high-gloss aesthetic chafes against its new seriousness.
“It’s also an interesting, underlooked age,” she writes of her mid-50s, “and women like me who spent the formative years of our adulthood with Carrie et al.
“It almost feels as if people don’t want us to be perfectly OK with where we are, as if they almost enjoy us being pained by who we are today, whether we choose to age naturally and not look perfect, or whether you do something if that makes you feel better,” she says.
InStyle has a chat Molly Rogers and Danny Santiago, who assisted Patricia Field on the original and design the costumes for the reboot, about the show’s high-low aesthetic.
Emily Nussbaum’s still indispensable essay places “Sex and the City” firmly within the prestige TV tradition and examines why critics have since downgraded its innovations and achievements.
In her new HBO comedy series, ‘Sex and the City,’ she always seems to be thrusting it forward.