August in New York and all anyone wants to talk about is Carrie Bradshaw and the end of And Just Like That. Cute boys in Brooklyn who just watched Sex in the City in its entirety for the first time, gay boys in Ellijay who were as invested in Carrie’s next chapter as I was, and all the girls everywhere. (What else were we supposed to talk about… the mayoral election? the rapid decline of our democracy? I’ll take a reprieve with Carrie Bradshaw.)
Of course, the talk was not all good. A lot of people really did not like this show. The sequel series to SATC, AJLT gave us three seasons and pulled the plug right before the season finale, making it a seemingly hasty series finale. The show was imperfect, sure. It was bafflingly nonsensical and deeply cringey at times. All I have to say about that is: I don’t care! That’s all beside the point. The only thing I care about is Carrie’s story.
My favorite piece of AJLT discourse was a quoted tweet on Instagram declaring: Carrie Bradshaw is one of the greatest characters ever created, up there with Odysseus, Hamlet… even Jesus. This cracked me up and also struck me as not hyperbole. What other heroine has charted her own flawed, fabulous, eternally hopeful, deeply romantic, unconventional, independent course through life—in her thirties, forties and now fifties? (If you can name one, I’d love to hear.)
The aspects of the show’s storytelling and plotting that I reflexively found flawed and dissatisfying soon came to feel more like a brilliant, if unintentional, metaphor for what life is really like as you grow older… flawed and dissatisfying. And tragic. If SATC left us with the fairytale of happily ever after with the ungettable bachelor Mr. Big, AJLT was intent on smashing that from the jump, killing him off in episode one, and leaving Carrie to navigate life and the city on her own once again.
In AJLT’s first two seasons, gone is Carrie Bradshaw’s clever voiceover, neatly framing every episode’s narrative arc in the guise of composing her column. The tight 30-minute episode container had broken open to unwieldy 45-minutes most of the time. Episodes meandered and then just ended, often leaving us wondering what the hell we had just witnessed without resolution or coherency—again, not unlike the plotting of our real lives.
In the third and final season, Carrie’s narration is back in the form of a thinly veiled autobiographical historical novel, “The woman wondered what she had gotten herself into…” And while this device also veered into the nonsensical and cringe, once again, I did not care. If Carrie Bradshaw wants to sort through the pieces of her life through third person fictional narrative, IDGAF. In fact, I am here for it. (Anyway, this woman has wondered plenty about what she has gotten herself into.)
At the end of season two, Carrie and Aiden agree to a five-year break. In the last scene, Carrie and Seema, sipping cosmos on the beach in Greece in the fallout of their romantic relationships, give us this delicious dialogue:
“We ran at love and where did that get us?”
“Greece.”
“What if they never come back?”
“Oh, there will be more.”
“Men?”
“Cocktails.”
There’s an eternal truth of the SATC universe at play here. The hopeful, if quixotic, search for true love moored to the soft seafloor of friendship and the many pleasures of life.
It felt like a fresh start for these ladies and I hoped we were done with Aiden for good. But in season three, there he was in episode after episode, Carrie twisting and contorting herself in a desperate attempt to make this doomed relationship work. I grew frustrated, angry. Hadn’t Carrie learned her lesson by now? Did we really need to go through this with her again? And yet, my very next thought was, how many times have I clung to a relationship with a man who lived in a different city who I should not have been with? And the answer to that question is, more than once. I couldn’t help but wonder… do people ever really change or do we just keep making the same mistakes over and over again in spite of ourselves?
After the fiasco of a relationship with Aiden and Carrie’s one night stand with her weird British downstairs neighbor writer who turned out to be a bigger mess than he initially let on, but who she may have wanted to love, anyway, I felt like Carrie was due for a complete mental breakdown about how Big was the only man who truly understood her and now he’s dead. That scene never came. There are a lot of things people wanted from And Just Like That that, ultimately, they are not going to get. Again, life.
I don’t want the show to be over. I want three more seasons no matter what and then another six-season reboot 15 years after that—I have to know what happens to Carrie Bradshaw!
But I’m satisfied with And Just Like That’s ending. Because I know the pure pleasure of returning to the peace and solitude of an apartment of your own in New York after a day or night spent winding through the city’s chaos and everyone else’s drama. On her own, in that big, empty townhouse on Gramercy Park, in the scene to end the series, Carrie’s future is wide open. Her next big love and adventure—perhaps the one she doesn’t even know she’s been waiting for this whole time—is just around the corner, or maybe it’s a little farther off than that; either way, she will be more than fine.
‘The OG Carrie Bradshaw’
And if you really want to know what happens to Carrie Bradshaw, might I remind you that Candace Bushnell, the woman who created Carrie as her alter ego in her newspaper column and books, is still single and fabulous, writing and living in the city.
I’d urge you to go back and read (or reread) her original Sex and the City book and then her 2019 follow-up, Is There Still Sex in the City? I also enjoyed her 2000 quartet of novellas, 4 Blondes. I don’t think she gets the credit she deserves for giving us one of the most iconic characters of all time. Her writing is sharp, incisive, funny and formally inventive. Her early books are period pieces, glimpses into a particular milieu of Manhattan life in the ‘90s.
Read the piece she published this summer in New York Magazine about not wanting to have sex with men on low-dose Viagra in the Hamptons.
She also debuted a one-woman show about her real life exploits behind SATC, which premiered at the same time as AJLT. It’s brilliant and hilarious, and she still occasionally performs it at places like the Carlyle.
