On Thursday, the series finale of And Just Like That … aired on HBO Max. “Party of One” brought an end to not just the three-season Sex and the City spinoff but the entire Sex and the City universe. After three series—including, of course, The Carrie Diaries—11 combined seasons, and two (but not three!) movies, the story of Sex and the City is seemingly finished for good. To mark the occasion, two of our writers and unabashed AJLT devotees staged a meeting of the minds to imagine pounding pastries at Hot Fellas Bakery, reflect on the uniquely compelling weirdness that was And Just Like That …, and pay tribute to the no-longer-ongoing adventures of the always-be-brunching Carrie Bradshaw, Miranda Hobbes, and Charlotte York.
Ben Lindbergh: Katie, I can’t believe And Just Like That … is gone. Then again, I can’t believe it ever existed. Like the last sentence of Carrie’s debut novel—which we must discuss—And Just Like That … was an epilogue that didn’t necessarily need to be written. But gosh, I’m glad it was.
AJLT was crammed with controversial character arcs that made it divisive from the start. It was frequently cringey, unfailingly frivolous, and sometimes nonsensical. And despite it all, I don’t think I’ve looked forward to watching any recent series more from week to week. I would have inhaled as many seasons as Michael Patrick King and Co. cared to make. Unfortunately, not enough people saw the spinoff that way. In his farewell post, MPK referred to AJLT as “the popular series.” But truly popular series typically don’t get canceled, and sure enough, the show’s audience had dwindled.
So often while watching this show, I felt like Carrie’s unnamed protagonist in the opening sentence of her “brilliant” (according to Duncan) book: “The Woman wondered what she’d gotten herself into.” (An awed Duncan’s verdict on that line—“It stopped me dead in my tracks”—made me question his literary judgment.) Just think about how much happened, and how many relationships ran their course, in a series that started, less than four years ago, with Big’s Peloton-induced death. The decision to send Stanford to a farm upstate (or, um, a temple in Japan). Lisa’s dad dying twice. The texts (and lone, lucrative call) from Samantha. Carrie’s podcasting career. The canceled-too-soon sitcom Che Pasa.
The tragedy—excuse me, romantic tragedy—is that the series ended just after it got good. Well, better. Enough that I was laughing with it much more than I was laughing at it (though both were fun). At first, the series awkwardly overcorrected for the original cast’s lack of diversity, but by Season 3, the slimmed-down ensemble seemed more comfortable, and the friendships felt less artificial. Lisa, especially, seemed like a full-fledged lead—not a Samantha substitute but someone whose scenes I enjoyed as much as those of the legacy characters. At times, the series really reminded me of classic SATC, and not just in a superficial sense.
After spending more than a quarter of a century with these women, I’m sad to see them (and dear old Harry and Anthony) go. I feel untethered to an important part of my past, like Carrie as she learns to live on her own in her Manhattan mansion (only with a lot less square footage and no karaoke machine). Am I wrong in thinking that the series hit its stride, such as it was, this season? Are you feeling its loss as keenly as I am? And what will you remember from this magical journey?
Katie Baker: I’m really going to miss the little thrill of select Friday mornings. Not only would it dawn on me that a new And Just Like That … episode was out, but I also knew I could look forward to the customary post-show flurry of social media posts that were all versions of: The hell did I just watch? Can’t wait for the next one! (The “and such small portions!” of our time.) Being reunited with characters I’d been watching since back when I was a teenager was a salve, even as many of AJLT’s choices left me puzzled.
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And so I’ll choose to remember things like Lisa Todd Wexley’s glamping getup (which my patron saint of outdoor style, Troop Beverly Hills’ Phyllis Nefler, sure would have admired). I’ll remember the genuine shock of the franchise offing its Big boy right off the hop, an inspired death that the rest of the series never did manage to live up to. I’ll remember the irritating verisimilitude with which Miranda gushed the name Joy all season when absolutely no one asked, which was a lot like the way she always gushed the name Che in the seasons before that. I feel confident in saying we will all remember Che. (In contrast, until this moment, I had already forgotten Nya. Hope she’s well!)
I’ll remember the good times: Charlotte scoring study drugs, Seema ripping darts all over town, Miranda boning not just a nun but a basic-ass tourist nun, any scene with a disapproving Eunice Wexley. I’ll remember the bad times: Anthony’s profane outbursts, Carrie’s meh novel. I’m actively trying not to remember the dog name “Sappho,” that one big, dumb hat of Carrie’s (miss u, Pat Field!), every scene involving/humiliating Steve, and the wasteful amounts of time and energy allotted to the dreary Aidan reprise. Virginia is for losers, pal.
Lindbergh: Wait, was there only one big, dumb hat? I’d have taken the over on that. As for Carrie’s on-again, off-again, finally extinguished old flame: For a longtime loather of Aidan like me, this season was sweet vindication. There’s a line between sensitivity and oversensitivity, and Aidan constantly crossed it.
Baker: A real five-tool guy when it comes to being exhausting! He can execute at home and on the road.
To return to your previous question, I mostly agree that in recent episodes, the series was hitting a stride. (If this were Sex and the City, here’s where the Carrie Bradshaw voice-over woulda said something like “Meanwhile, in Central Park, Samantha was getting serious about hitting her stride …” as we cut to Ms. Jones clad in nothing but a heart-rate monitor and some leg warmers while she gets a morning workout in with some jogger du jour. Miss u.) It’s just that the stride it was hitting seemed designed for a longer-distance endeavor, one with a nice, conversational pace.
Which is why I’m skeptical about the official story that showrunner Michael Patrick King had decided before the season that this would be the end of the run! As a season finale, I could see the vision of “Party of One”: Just about every character is left with a lot of open road ahead of them. But as a series finale, it felt more like an unfocused warm-up lap than a definitive and iconic photo finish.
To be fair, though, Ben: Much like Harry on Thanksgiving, finales are hard! What stood out to you about this one?
Lindbergh: The finale was … fine. I wasn’t expecting a grand artistic statement, considering the tacked-on nature of the clearly unplanned last two episodes and the shorter running times of four of the final five. Though this probably should’ve been a half-hour show all along, à la the original—those extra 15 minutes a week were enough time to get AJLT into trouble.
Baker: Well, they had to fit in Herbert’s comptroller run (?) somehow …
Lindbergh: Nor was I disappointed that Duncan didn’t return to sweep Carrie off her noisy Manolos. I’m on board with the “Carrie doesn’t need a man to make her happy” message, and I enjoyed her disillusioning return to “73rd Street” last week. (Poor Carrie, sentenced to spend her twilight years in Gramercy Park.) I understood her nostalgia: The throwback SATC closing-credits music made me want to go home again too.
But even though Charlotte and Miranda had some meaningful moments, I would’ve liked for the core trio to spend more time together at the end, which they couldn’t do because of the farcical Thanksgiving setup. I wasn’t expecting so much of the last glimpse we’ll get of these characters (probably?) to be devoted to the consequences of the just-introduced Epcot’s lactose intolerance. (SNL had an Epcot character first!) But then, “I wasn’t expecting …” is how many of my thoughts about And Just Like That … start, so the conclusion was in keeping with the rest of the run.
Baker: So, Epcot’s parents? They are Disney FREA—[gets flattened by an oncoming uptown 6 train before I can pivot to mama Mia’s IRL ancestry].
Lindbergh: I suspect that AJLT’s writers started with a pun like “baby mama Mia” or “a woman’s right to shoes” and reverse engineered a whole story line just to set it up. Which, frankly, I respect.
Now that AJLT has gone the way of X, Y, and Me, are you left lamenting unfinished business or thinking that Kim Cattrall was right to uncouple herself from this series (and the planned movie it morphed out of) from the start? Why do you think AJLT failed to find (or keep) an audience, despite its hate-watch/guilty-pleasure potential? (I wonder whether it would have worked any better on HBO proper—though it definitely felt like a streaming-only release.) Which characters do you think the spinoff/sequel helped or hurt most, and did any new ones take their place in the pantheon of SATC? (Aside from Lotus/Shoe, who happily found a forever home.)
Finally, how, if at all, has AJLT affected the franchise’s legacy? It’s tough to evaluate Sex and the City’s standing in 2025; the original series has been gone so long, but aside from Samantha, its leads never left.
Baker: Glad you asked! Here is an incomplete list of some things I think I think, in absolutely no coherent order:
- I am not left lamenting unfinished business so much as I am left lamenting untapped potential. The original Sex and the City series was based on—and tonally true to!—the work of the frank, funny writer Candace Bushnell. So I took note when Bushnell recently published a vivid essay in New York called “Sex After 60 in Sag Harbor” that largely served to highlight just how flat And Just Like That … can be in comparison. True, most of our AJLT characters haven’t celebrated that particular “big birthday” just yet, but still: Find me anything, anything in three seasons of the show that came close to capturing the pathos and precision of just this one paragraph alone!
"Eddie was 77, but my friend assured me he wasn’t an 'old' 77 as he still skied in Aspen and ran half-marathons. At one time, the thought of dating a 77-year-old would have been an instant 'no,' but now, 70-, 80-, 90-, and even 100-year-old men were my new reality despite the fact that I would likely turn out to be too old for them. I reminded myself to stay open-minded about Eddie’s age. Although the unspoken truth was that if things 'worked out' with Eddie, in three, five, or 10 years, I would certainly be taking care of him (if I were still compos mentis myself)."
Ultimately, this show had the opportunity to really dive into the many indignities and idiosyncrasies of being fabulous women of advancing age. Instead, we got karaoke machines and bridal fashion shows. - Kim Cattrall—perhaps having remembered the bonkers treatment of Samantha in the second SATC film—crushed it indeed with her decision to stay home for this particular shindig, save for that one baller drive-by. Chic!
- I think audiences would have held up their end of the bargain if And Just Like That … had shown, like, any interest in doing the same! Instead, we got double deaths and double Libras and characters idling like double-parked black SUVs and that Kirkland-brand rehash of the Samantha-Smith story line (sorry, Seema and armpit man!). And—hey, where’d everyone go?
- Biggest AJLT winner: Harry, a Mets fan and a wife guy who is so supportive that he’ll pee his trendy denim pants for love! Biggest AJLT losers: the characters of Aidan and Miranda. (I now understand why Star Wars nerds bicker about what is and isn’t canon. Can we treat, like, everything that has happened with “Cynthetic Nixon” the way people treat the origin story of Han Solo’s surname?) Also, the IRL Sarah Jessica Parker. Maybe this is unfair of me, but I find that lately SJP kinda comes across as feeling, like, a little too cool for ol’ Carrie and her legion of fans? It’s understandable and also off-putting.
- One other AJLT winner: the original SATC series! Sometimes when I’ve finished watching an episode of the new show, the HBO app automatically shoots me back to the original one—and the difference in quality, verve, ambience, and ambition is usually striking. I miss the four-girls-one-table equation something fierce. But speaking of fierce: What I REALLY miss are some of those knock-down, drag-out Carrie-Miranda fights of yore. Bickering over a banana just isn’t the same!
Lindbergh: In fairness to Carrie, Miranda really was the worst houseguest. Why would she use Carrie’s scarf to sop up the Mexican Coke?! But it did seem to me that the old Miranda (by which I mean the young Miranda) would have stuck to her guns in that kitchen quarrel over Carrie’s feelings for Duncan. (Speaking of that squabble, why is the kitchen in Carrie’s palatial estate so small?)
Baker: That minuscule table by the window makes me claustrophobic! While we’re on the subject of food: What are you dropping off at Miranda’s housewarming Thanksgiving before bailing on her/Victor Garber? (Which, btw, poor guy! First the Titanic, now this watery mess?!) For convenience, and because I refuse to get negged by the pie lady, I’m probably going Hot Fellas sourdough loaf—even though those dudes remind me of when I lived around the corner from the SoHo Hollister store and there were workers who stood outside dressed like lifeguards, with the nose zinc and everything, spritzing cologne into the air as I tried to walk to the subway. Sorry, that was probably more of a comment.
Lindbergh: For old times’ sake, I’d have brought a Duncan Hines chocolate cake and an Entenmann’s lemon strudel—baked callbacks to an early nod to Miranda’s addictive tendencies and a previous unplanned pregnancy.
Baker: You know, I kinda still can’t believe that they (a) skipped the Thanksgiving dinner entirely and (b) deprived us of one last Charlotte-Carrie-Miranda meal. Cripes!
Lindbergh: A last Sex and the City supper was certainly in order. Kelly Rowland—who knows a thing or two about being part of a three-member girl group—spoke for … well, some of us in her comment on SJP’s poetic (?) Instagram goodbye to Carrie:
Baker: Wow, she’s just like me fr.
Lindbergh: If the supply of Sex and the City–associated content ends here, I may have to console myself by listening to the official AJLT companion podcast, which sounds like a trip.
Baker: In my mind, they record that pod live from the X, Y, and Me set; one of the seats is filled by the tomato Squishmallow companion from the robot sushi restaurant, and another seat is taken by the Giuseppe puppet—which apparently took seven months to commission, according to the pod.
Lindbergh: SJP did refer to the finale as “this chapter complete,” which theoretically left an opening for another epilogue, and well-known IP never perishes. Do you think this is farewell to the franchise? The third installment of a Sex and the City cinematic trilogy writes itself, or would if SJP and Kim Cattrall could stand the sight of each other: Carrie crosses the Atlantic (again) to reunite with Samantha and Duncan. But the evidently diminished appetite for this franchise wouldn’t warrant the amount of money it would take to make that happen. Plus, we probably know too much about SJP and KC’s real-life feud to suspend disbelief about their characters’ fictional friendship.
Baker: My future request is that some character (sorry, Harry!) ought to get banned from MSG, as is the style of the times. Or maybe they can do a crossover season in which Lisa Kudrow’s Valerie Cherish relocates to Manhattan and joins the ol’ gals for espresso martinis! Michael Patrick King is the cocreator of The Comeback, after all. But regardless of format, I vote we leave Duncan and his questionable literary taste in Carrie’s past.
She may be happy alone—sorry, on her own—now, and I love that for her, but there’s also no way it’s permanent. Say what you will about Carrie. She’s selfish, she’s stubborn, she stomps. But the lady has always had rizz, well before the children had even coined the term. We all deserve to see her return to a life of witty banter. One sadness I have about this cancellation is that I do feel we were on the brink of a Season 4 filled with new suitors, just like the good old days.
Speaking of which: You mentioned that you’ve been along for the ride for more than a quarter century. I, too, am of the generational cohort that transitioned smoothly and directly from having a Samantha doll to being such a Samantha. What’s your origin story? I remember that the summer I graduated from high school, in 2001, my friend (also named “Katie B.”) and I rented the DVDs of the first three seasons to see what all the fuss was about. We sat on her sofa for like a week straight. There were so many episodes! Our eyes widened at a lot of new facts of life! And just like that, we were ready for college, and the world.
Lindbergh: I came along a little later: As an 11-year-old when SATC premiered in 1998, I wasn’t exactly its target audience. (Which was just as well, because I didn’t have HBO.) But to a New York lonely boy like me, the series seemed inescapable. Of course, Carrie wouldn’t be caught dead on the West Side, where I lived—as Samantha once said when Carrie went to the West Coast on a book tour, “You wouldn’t go to the Upper West Side. You’re going to San Francisco?”—but I did go to school on the Sex and the City side of Central Park, and the show was always shooting somewhere nearby. It’s not as if NYC-centric stories are in short supply, but there was something exciting about knowing that the characters in a cultural sensation were walking (more or less) the same streets I was. Plus, it had s-e-x in the title (!), which added extra allure. The series was zeitgeisty enough among the Manhattan grade-school set that I remember asking a girl on AOL Instant Messenger whether Big was so dubbed because he was well-endowed. She responded by asking whether I was gay. Ah, the ’90s. For quite a while, Sex and the City wasn’t much more to me than a Buzzfeed quiz here or a sanitized rerun there. It wasn’t until years after the original run that I watched the series from start to finish. And while some aspects were dated, the friendships and humor held up. So while AJLT rarely rose to the same level, even a pale imitation was still a treat. I know I already quoted Kelly Rowland, but I’ll also signal-boost the TikTok commenter who said, “This show is awful. I’ma watch it tho.” Come next Thursday, I’ll wish we could.
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