The show, which premiered on HBO in 1998, would end the following year, and, aside from two increasingly ill-advised feature films, Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha have lived in infinite syndicated loops ever since.
The impulse behind And Just Like That, created by original writer Michael Patrick King, is nothing if not nostalgic, but, at the same time, the new show seems eager to move away from its turn of the century ancestor.
Chase, co-writer Lawrence Konner, and director Alan Taylor never seemed up to tackling the intricacies of the riots that serve as the film’s central conflict, and the film remains uncomfortably reliant on cute connections to the original series.
It’s understandable that these writers would want to explore new possibilities while relying on their beloved cast of characters as a safety net, but, especially for shows that did so much to reinvent the form of TV in the 21st century, it’s somewhat baffling how little the new series seem to care about how those stories were told.
The questions raised by And Just Like That—whether Carrie was always a prude, for instance, or if Miranda would have actually become a clueless, pronoun-bungling, white feminist cliché—are fun and even illuminating, especially as somewhat self-conscious critiques of the original show.
In an essay on Sex and the City and The Sopranos in 2013, Emily Nussbaum argued that, while SATC was often condescended to as a shallow sitcom, its true form was a kind of philosophical romantic comedy, using the horizonless expanse of serial TV to stage symbolic debates about sexuality, femininity, and love.
Producing a feature-length period coming-of-age film tethered so closely to the fates of the series’ original characters neglects the fact that The Sopranos made the impact it did because of its patient week-by-week reinvention of multiple TV genres, from the soap opera to the mob show to the Western.
This week, it was reported that HBO is planning a return to another beloved early 2000s series by reviving Six Feet Under.
But, given that And Just Like That has apparently been a huge success for HBO Max, and David Chase seems back in the fold with a standing order for more Sopranos content, it’s unsurprising that HBO is going back into the vaults for more.